Part One
|
1920s Culture
|
|
|
This
section explores the culture of the 1920s. It is in the 1920s
that we can see fully formed the shape of culture in the modern
era. The emergence of advertising and mass media, technological
advances such as radio, airplanes and automobiles--all irrevocably
changed America and Americans.
|
|
|
Questions/Thinking Points
|
|
|
Lecture One: Consumerism and Culture
|
|
|
Lecture Two: Culture and Discontents
|
|
|
Art, Music and Literature
|
|
Quiz
|
1920s
Culture
|
Web CT
|
Part Two
|
Business and Government
|
|
|
This section explores the
relationship
between business and government in the 1920s. Americans,
disillusioned
with reform and their failure to achieve their goals at the Versailles
Conferenced,
turned their backs on Wilson and Progressivism. In 1920, they
elected
a Republican, Warren G. Harding, to be their new president.
Harding
was an inept leader, but he did assemble a cabinet of visionary men
whose
belief in the salutary powers of business led them to transform the
purpose
of the government agencies established by the Progressives.
Andrew
Mellon and Herbert Hoover, in particular, used their positions at
Treasury
and Commerce, respectively, to place business at the heart of American
government.
Mellon's tax breaks to business helped fuel the subsequent
specualtive
boom in stocks, while Hoover's articulation of moral arguments on
behalf
of business, all contributed to this transformation of business.
Harding's
successor, Calvin Coolidge, carried forth in this tradition with his
worship
of business. All of these factors combined to a blind America to
some
fatal weaknesses in their economic structure--weaknesses that led to
the
Great Crash of 1929. |
|
|
Questions/Thinking Points
|
|
|
Introduction
|
|
Lecture One
|
"The Great Barbecue"
|
|
Lecture Two
|
The Economics of Republicanism
|
|
Lecture Three
|
"The New Era": Business Ethics and Morality in
Babylon
|
|
Lecture Four
|
The Times, They are a Changin': 1928-29
|
|
Lecture
Five
|
The Great Crash
|
|
Quiz
|
Business
and the Twenties
|
WebCT
|
|
|
|