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The Twenties, 1920-1929

TRANSCRIPT: Okay, let's talk 1920s. This is not a difficult subject for kids to enjoy, so you're entering a pretty good time period. So the Roaring Twenties is generally seen as the Roaring Twenties. Kids are going to come preset with this idea of flappers and speakeasies. Sometimes their mind may blend that with other eras, but for the most part, they already come ready to see all the excitement of mobsters and dancing. So please do not spare that. There are plenty of fun videos and resources where there are actual footage of speakeasies and people talking about it. So, you know, as much as you can, bring that into your classroom. You know, play 1920s music when they come in and, you know, if you have a nice outfit or an excellent 1920s hat, jump in. Myself, I love the slang of the era. We do a whole thing where the kids are driving an old jalopy and I give them, you know, 60 or 70 1920s slang terms and they got to come up with their own skits. Super fun. Kids get very into it.

So the Roaring Twenties in your classroom, you know, should be roaring. But a lot of historians also look at the 1920s from the other side, and where it may be called the Roaring Twenties one day, it's also referred to sometimes as the nervous generation. That there's some undercurrent that people understand has gone wrong and they're sort of like having one last gasp party before that that, you know, surfaces.

Some of the things that point at the fact that it's a nervous generation is number one, the agricultural America is struggling. Bring in images. They're not quite at the Dust Bowl yet, but they're being foreclosed on. Having returned from World War I, they've lost their market on a lot of international food. So there's already part of America to look at that is not so roaring after all.

But the other really dark side of America are the rise of things like the KKK. The KKK reaches its height in America. It broadens out of the South. And there are a lot of images of 1920s KKK rallies, stories of the KKK. And this goes on to sort of touch on this undercurrent of America, and it's the agricultural America. There's still feeling like they're getting left behind, that there's modernity in the cities, but the agricultural world is still traditional and Christian and biblical, and they don't feel like this Roaring Twenties is something that they want to understand. So as you go into the 1920s, don't spare the exciting parts of it, but absolutely bring in that second undercurrent of what's going on.

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