A lecture that explains the economic character of the 1920s will be important on its own terms and also for understanding the very different character of the 1930s. The lecture should stress the rationalization of production and distribution, the astonishing development of consumerism in American life, widespread prosperity, and costs to the environment. The lecture should also probe the soft spots of the economy: burgeoning speculation, the weak agricultural sector, the circumstances of minority workers and of the unskilled generally. George Soule, Prosperity Decade: From War to Depression (1947), is an excellent source. Additional valuable sources are noted in the bibliography at the end of Chapter 234 of the text. For still more bibliographic suggestions and a fine brief account of the history of the decade, see Paul A. Carter, The Twenties in America (second edition; 1975).

To leave the 1920s without considering the Jazz Age would be to lose an opportunity for a stimulating lecture, an enjoyable class, and an enhanced understanding of the time. The lecture should deal with prohibition, lawlessness, and pleasure seeking. It should mention the diminished sense of connection with one's family and one's neighborhood. It should assess new freedoms that were hard to handle. Instructors may find it useful to focus on the automobile as a liberating agent and, consequently, a source of danger. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (1931), has been entertaining and informing readers for two-thirds of a century. For other good general accounts, see David A. Shannon, Between the Wars: America, 1919-1941 (1965), and Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties (1982). The chapter bibliography has a number of more specialized suggestions as well.

African-American students may have some knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance, but that knowledge may be meager. White Sstudents are likely to know little if anything about itthe Harlem Renaissance. Here is an opportunity to consider one of the nation's most significant minority groups and to broaden students' understanding of the cultural kaleidoscope of the United States. The lecture can begin with the creation of the community of Harlem, a lesson in urban history. It will continue with the Great Migration and then take up such themes as music, literature, and race pride. See especially Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (1968); Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (1971); Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930 (1995); and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1989). See also Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America (revised edition; 1965), and Robert B. Grant, The Black Man Comes to the City: A Documentary Account from the Great Migration to the Great Depression, 1915-1930 (1972). Further exploration can be found in Malaika Adero, editor, Up South: Stories, Studies, and Letters of This Century's African American Migration (1992). Charles Keil, Urban Blues (1966), does not deal with the 1920s directly but does provide a superior introduction to the subject.

The 1920s was one of the high points of nativism in the United States, a sentiment that has never really died. Students need an opportunity to examine nativism and its consequences. Instructors may wish to treat it as a general theme, referring to the Know-Nothings of the 1850s, the American Protective Association of the 1890s, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, and rumblings of discontent about immigrants in the 1990s. Why does nativism flourish more strongly at some times than at others? Instructors will want to consider the immigration-restriction movement of the 1920s. Was that a manifestation of nativism? Or was it a realistic response to the problem of immigration? John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955), offers a good foundation for the lecture. Donald M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (1965); Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (1967); Karl Frederickson, The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s (1997); and Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994) are the sources for the Klan. Robert Divine, American Immigration Policy, 1924-1952 (1957), discusses the legislation of the 1920s, and Paul L. Murphy, "Intolerance in the 1920s," Journal of American History 51 (June 1964): 60-76, presents a brief overview. At a time when race, nationality, and ethnicity were generally melded together, what later in the century was identified as racism deserves particular mention. See William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (1972); Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (1995), which traces a relationship between lynching and cotton prices; and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 1880-1930 (1993).