USM Open Source History Text: The World at War: World History 1914-1945Main MenuIntroduction: A Mural as WindowOn Diego Rivera's Detroit IndustryThe World Around 1914, Part I: the Journey of Young GandhiThe World Around 1914, Part II: The Era of Nationalism and Imperialism (1848-1914)The First World WarThe Long Russian Revolution (1917 – 1929)The Decline of the West? Europe from 1919 – 1929A New Middle East: The Rise of the Middle East State SystemChina Between Qing Collapse and WWIILatin America Between Boom and Bust (1911-1929)Africa Under Colonial Rule: Politics and Race from 1914‐1939The United States from The First World War to the Great DepressionThe Great DepressionThree Varieties of Radicalism in the 1930s: Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Imperial JapanThree Responses to Modernity: Ho Chi Minh, Ibn Saud, and Getulio VargasThe Second World WarSeth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c
A Nation of Contradictions
12017-07-14T12:33:02-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c192372plain2020-11-27T01:19:25-08:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929cThe 1920s were a decade of incredible economic growth that concealed fundamental economic weakness. They were a period of great progressive movements (women’s rights, Harlem Renaissance) coupled with social conservatism (prohibition, anti-communism, religious fundamentalism, Nativism and anti-immigration policy). It was a decade of economic globalization and political isolation. It was a decade of the individualist “myth” and that of the creation of a conformist consumer society, symbolized perfectly by mass production of Ford’s Model T. Cars were individualist icons, but led to lives of increasing standardization and conformity, not least in the pressures that mounting debt placed on the individual (almost all cars were debt-financed). In sum, the 1920s were a decade of stark contradictions. The end of the 1920s, the 1929 crash of the New York Stock Exchange, brought these tensions in American life into stark relief.
