Recommended Reading

General surveys of the 1920s include Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order (1979), and Donald McCoy, Coming of Age (1973). Books on economic themes are James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (1988); Allen Nevins and Frank E. Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (1957); James Prothro, The Dollar Decade (1954); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 1920–1940 (1985); Martha L. Olney, Buy Now, Pay Later (1991); and Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Strategy and Structure (1962). The best books on labor are Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years (1960); Robert H. Zieger, Republicans and Labor, 1919–1929 (1969); and Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal (1990). James Shideler discusses the postwar agricultural depression in Farm Crisis (1957).

Social and cultural history is covered in Paul Carter, Another Part of the Twenties (1976); Stanley Coben, Rebellion Against Victorianism (1991); Chip Rhodes, Structures of the Jazz Age (1998); and Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful (1977).

The role of women in the 1920s is examined in William H. Chafe, The American Woman (1972); J. Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen (1973); Dorothy M. Brown, Setting a Course (1987); Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of American Feminism (1987); and Winifred D. Wandersee, Women’s Work and Family Values, 1920–1940 (1981). For blacks in the 1920s, see Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (1971), and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981), a lively account of black culture. The career of Marcus Garvey is traced in Tony Martin, Race First (1976), and Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey (1986). Books that deal with the Mexican American experience in California and Texas include Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles (1983); George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American (1993); and David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors (1995).

Frederick Hoffman, The Twenties (1955), and Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (1942), survey the literary trends during the decade. Other studies of this subject are Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation (1969), and Edmund Wilson, Shores of Light (1952). Biographies of major literary figures of the period include William Manchester, Disturber of the Peace (1951), on H. L. Mencken; Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise (1951), on F. Scott Fitzgerald; Mark Shorer, Sinclair Lewis (1961); and Carlos Baker, Hemingway (1956).

Studies of political fundamentalism include Robert K. Murray, Red Scare (1955); William Young and David E. Kaiser, Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Venzetti (1985); and Stanley Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer (1963), on the postwar panic over radicalism; Andrew Sinclair, Prohibition (1962), on the noble experiment; David Chalmers, Hooded Americans (1965); Leonard Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (1991); Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry (1994); and Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City (1967), on the KKK; Robert A. Divine, American Immigration Policy (1957), and John Higham, Strangers in the Land (1955), on nativism and immigration restriction; and Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods (1998), on the Scopes trial.

For political developments during the 1920s, see Robert Murray, The Politics of Normalcy (1973); Douglas B. Craig, After Wilson (1992); David Horowitz, Beyond Left and Right (1997); Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove (1968); Robert H. Ferrell, The Presidency of Calvin Coolidge (1998); Charles W. Eagles, Democracy Divided (1990); Joan H. Wilson, Herbert Hoover (1975); Martin L. Fausold, The Presidency of Herbert Hoover (1985); and David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (1979). Allan Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics (1979), and Kristi Andersen, The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928–1936 (1979), offer contrasting interpretations of the election of 1928.