Tennessee Wesleyan College

1920s Social and Cultural Trends

Henry Ford Museum on the life of Henry Ford

Frederick Winslow Taylor, business innovator of Scientific Management (PBS site)

Images and political cartoons from the Red Scare (1919-1920 public alarm about Communism in America)

1924 Leopold & Loeb case of two teenage killers in Chicago, seen to represent a shocking national moral decay
          --site on Leopold & Loeb trial, including confession, and court documents
          --Northwestern Univ site on Leopold & Loeb featuring numerous documents, newspaper
                    accounts, and pictures

1924 Scopes “Monkey Trial” on teaching evolution
          -- H.L. Mencken column satrizing the South's stance on the issue of  evolution:  "Homo
                      Neanderthalensis"

1920s Consumer Advertising:
     --Audio clips of 1920s & 1930s Radio Advertising (as advertising was entering an important
             heyday)
     --Advertising in 1920s Women’s magazines
     -- Variety of ads for cosmetics, hair products, deodorants, radios, etc.

Religion in the 1920s:
     -- 1926 poem about Sister Aimee Semple McPherson's disappearance   (written by Upton Sinclair)
     -- website on popular evangelist Billy Sunday (including written sermons,  audio clips, and images)
     -- Pro-prohibition sermon by evangelist Billy Sunday
     -- Billy Graham Center website on evangelist Billy Sunday (at Wheaton  College)

Prohibition in the 1920s:
     -- website on Prohibition and the Temperance Movement (Ohio State U.)
     -- Digital collection of documents on Prohibition and the Temperance Movement (Brown Univ.)
     -- Documents and overview of Prohibition (National Archives)

     --More documents and links on a variety of topics regarding Prohibition

Art and Literature in the 1920s

Extensive site on William Faulkner (Univ. of Mississippi)

Poet T.S. Eliot
      --  "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"  (1917)
     -- "The Wasteland"  (1922)
     -- "The Hollow Men"  (1925)

 Full text online of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous 1920 novel This Side of Paradise

Full text of Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt online

Full text of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Private site with links on Ernest Hemingway

Full text online of Willa Cather’s 1922 Pulitzer-prize winning One of Ours (novel of a Midwestern American’s journey to the front of World War I)

Harlem Renaissance (extraordinary period of African American literature):
     -- Claude McKay Poems: "If We Must Die," and "TheWhite House"
     -- Langston Hughes Poems: "Let America Be America Again," "Mother to
              Son," and "America"

Full text online of famous playwright Eugene O’Neill’s three plays, “The Hairy Ape,” “Anna Christie,” and “The First Man.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay:
     --Full text online of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Renascence and Other Poems
            (1917)
     -- Millay's poem "Conscientious Objector"

Gertrude Stein:
     -- brief biography of Stein
     -- full text online of Stein's 1909 novel Three Lives
     -- full text online of Stein's 1914 poetry volume Tender Buttons

World War II Combat

Famous columns written by the beloved American war correspondent Ernie Pyle

Famous Pyle column on the shore remains from the D-Day landing

Message Drafted by General Eisenhower in Case the D-Day Invasion Failed and Photographs Taken on D-Day (National Archives)