Question

1. How would you characterize the business and cultural developments of the 1920s?

2. In what ways did these developments produce dissent or lead to “culture wars” between urban and rural Americans?

3. What were the consequences of these culture wars?

Answer 1

1). The Jazz Age was a cultural period and movement that took place in America during the 1920s from which both new styles of music and dance emerged. Largely credited to African Americans employing new musical techniques along with traditional African traditions, jazz soon expanded to America's white middle class.

Birth of Jazz

Following World War I, large numbers of jazz musicians migrated from New Orleans to major northern cities such as Chicago and New York, leading to a wider dispersal of jazz as different styles developed in different cities. As the 1920s progressed, jazz rose in popularity and helped to generate a cultural shift. Because of its popularity in speakeasies, illegal nightclubs where alcohol was sold during Prohibition, and its proliferation due to the emergence of more advanced recording devices, jazz became very popular in a short amount of time, with stars including Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Chick Webb. Several famous entertainment venues such as the Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club came to epitomize the Jazz Age

.The 1920s was a remarkable period of creativity that brought forth new, bold movements that changed the way the world looked at itself, both externally and internally. In design and architecture, Art Deco originated in Europe and spread throughout the continent before its influence moved across the Atlantic to North America. In art, the movements known as Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism all played major roles in reconfiguring the focus and perception not only of visual arts, but also of literature, drama, and design.

2)The term "culture war" has different meanings depending on the time and place where it is used, as it relates to conflicts relevant to a specific area and era. Originally, it refers to the conflict between traditionalist, classical liberal, or conservative values and social democratic, progressive or social liberal values in the Western world, as well as other countries. Culture wars have influenced the debate over history, science and other curricula in all societies around the world.

It has come to signify different matters in modern United States, Canada, Australia, Europe, and generally, all over the world.It leads to cultural war.Many Americans expressed anxieties about the changes that had remade the United States and, seeking scapegoats, many middle-class white Americans pointed to Eastern European and Latin American immigrants (Asian immigration had already been almost completely prohibited), or African Americans who now pushed harder for civil rights and after migrating out of the American South to northern cities as a part of the Great Migration, that mass exodus which carried nearly half a million blacks out of the South between just 1910-1920. Protestants, meanwhile, continued to denounce the Roman Catholic Church and charged that American Catholics gave their allegiance to the Pope and not to their country.

3)Is there a culture war in the United States? Of course. There always has been and always will be.

Those who battle today over gay marriage or abortion might usefully remember our unusual national experiment with banning the sale of alcohol, one of America's defining cultural moments. It pitted self-control (or puritanism) against pleasure (or self-indulgence), immigrants against the native-born, Protestants against Catholics—and, yes, Protestants against Protestants, the drinking Lutherans and Episcopalians against the abstemious Baptists and Methodists. This being America, even the moralists had a sense of humor about themselves. "They pray for Prohibition," went the ditty, "and then they vote for gin."