Name . Group . The Roaring Twenties

The Culture of the 20’s-StationsDirections: You will spend the class period completing six stations on different forms of entertainment in the 1920’s. Each station will have a set of directions, readings, and activities for you to complete. You will have 8

minutes at each station. USE YOUR TIME WISELY. Follow the directions carefully and have fun! Answer the questions on this paper at each station. Each person in your group will turn this hand out in for a grade.

Station ASports and Fads

1. What are three things that were popular in the 1920’s?

2. Why would Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb not be suitable role models in today’s world?

3. What was “flag pole sitting”?

Station BJazz

1. How was Jazz different from previous forms of music?

2. What type of music can jazz be compared to today?

3. What is your reaction to jazz music?

Station CThe Lost Generation

1. Name two writers from the lost generation.

2. What did the phrase “The Lost Generation” refer to?

3. How did the movie clip reflect the idea of “The Lost Generation”?

Station DRadio and Movie Theaters

1. What was the name of the first radio station? Where did it broadcast from?

2. How were movie theaters in the 20’s different than today’s theaters?

Station EThe Charleston

1. What group of people did the Charleston become especially popular with?

Station FThe Harlem Renaissance

1. What was the Harlem Renaissance? What did it inspire writers and artists to do?

2. How does Langston Hughes’ poem, “Democracy” represent the ideas of the Harlem Renaissance?

3. What is Hughes tired of? Explain.

4. What is your reaction to this poem? How does it make you feel?

Summary Writing Prompt

Now that you have learned about some of the ways that people had fun in the 1920’s, which one did you find the most appealing? Would you have danced the

night away to jazz? Would you have been an obsessive baseball fan? In 5-7 sentences, tell me about which station you found the most interesting and why.

Station A-Sports and Fads

Directions: 1. Read the background reading below.2. Answer the questions on your handout.

Background:The radio created the conditions for national fads. Without such a method of live and immediate communication, fads could amount only to local crazes. Roaring Twenties fads ranged from the athletic to the ludicrous. One of the most popular trends of the decade was the dance marathon. New dance steps such as THE CHARLESTON swept the nation's dance halls, and young Americans were eager to prove their agility. In a typical dance marathon, contestants would dance for forty-five minutes and rest for fifteen. The longest marathons lasted thirty-six hours or more. Beauty pageants came into vogue. The first MISS AMERICA PAGEANT was staged in Atlantic City in 1921. One of the most bizarre fads was FLAGPOLE SITTING. The object was simple: be the person who could sit atop the local flagpole for the longest period of time. Fifteen-year-old AVON FOREMAN of Baltimore set the amateur standard — ten days, ten hours, ten minutes, and ten seconds. CROSSWORD PUZZLE fever swept the nation when Simon and Schuster published America's first crossword puzzle book.

Spectator sports provided opportunities for others to grab the limelight. TY COBB and BABE RUTH were role models for hundreds of thousands of American boys. Fortunately, Cobb's outward racism and Ruth's penchant for drinking and womanizing were shielded from admiring youngsters. Football had RED GRANGE, and boxing had JACK DEMPSEY. GERTRUDE EDERLE impressed Americans by becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel. These heroes gave Americans, anxious about the uncertain future and rapidly fading past, a much needed sense of stability.

Station BJazz

Directions:1. Complete the background reading below.2. Using your laptops, go to the following link and listen to the music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wbNZFS3MDA3. Answer the questions on your hand out.

Background:When the new sound of jazz first spread across America in the early twentieth-century, it left delight and controversy in its wake. The more popular it became, the more the liberating and sensuous music was criticized by everyone and everything from carmaker Henry Ford to publications like the Ladies Home Journal and The New York Times. Yet jazz survived.

Jazz was different because it broke the rules -- musical and social. It featured improvisation over traditional structure, performer over composer, and black American experience over conventional white sensibilities. Undercurrents of racism bore strongly upon the opposition to jazz, which was seen as barbaric and immoral.

The advent of Prohibition in 1920 brought jazz into gangster-run nightclubs -- the only venues that served alcohol and hired black musicians. Whites and blacks began mixing socially for the first time in the Black and Tan clubs of Chicago. White youth from all social classes were drawn to jazz and the seductive new dances that went along with it. With the help of the monkey glide, the turkey trot, and the Charleston, they were moved by the music, figuratively and literally.

But even today, the controversy over gangster rap and explicit song lyrics suggests that concern still exists over the effect that some African American popular music may have on its listeners. "Unless we speak against this [rap music], it will creep continually into our society and destroy the morals of our young people," declares Reverend Calvin Butts. "It's controversial because it provides something different," sums up rap artist Chuck D. "It's a different point of view."

Station CThe Lost Generation

Directions:1. Read the back ground reading below.2. On your laptops go to the link provided for you, watch the video clip. (1

hand out per group!)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXxw6tpM970

3. Answer the questions on your hand out.

Background:The Lost Generation was a term used to describe the generation of writers active immediately after World War I. Gertrude Stein used the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway, supposedly quoting a garage mechanic saying to her, "You are all a lost generation." The phrase signifies a disillusioned postwar generation characterized by lost values, lost belief in the idea of human progress, and a mood of futility and despair leading to self-indulgence. The mood is described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in THIS SIDE OF PARADISE (1920) when he writes of a generation that found "all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."

"Lost generation" usually refers specifically to the American expatriate writers associated with 1920s Paris, especially Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Hemingway used the phrase "You are all a lost generation" as the epigraph to his first novel THE SUN ALSO RISES (1926), and the influential critic Malcolm Cowley used "lost generation" in various studies of expatriate writers.

Station DRadio and Movie Theaters

Directions:1. Read the background information below. 2. Answer the questions on your hand out.

Background:RadioIn the 1920s there were no TV's so the people would listen to their radios. When the people tuned it they could listen to comedy shoes, news, live events, jazz music, variety shows, drama, or opera. By 1923 nearly three million people owned radios. Radios were also used for newspapers being read so that the people could know what was going on. By 1922 there were 600 radio stations. In 1921 Chicago got its first radio station called KYW. It played Opera six days a week. After the opera season ended they started playing different things, popular music, classical music, sporting events, lectures, fictional stories, newscasts, weather reports, market updates, and political commentary.

Movie TheatersIn the 1920s theaters became a big hit. Going to the movies was like a "magical experience." People loved going to the movies so much that they later started calling them "picture palaces." When people walked into the movie theaters there would be ushers to lead them to their seats. The ushers would be all dressed up in uniforms. Some of these movie theaters were the size of cathedrals. Theaters had movies, plays, and many other different things to watch for entertainment. Some of these movie theaters had marble-lined halls. People could even bring their children when they went to the movie theaters. This is because they had nurseries in the movie theater. They also had things like dance floors, restaurants, and art galleries. Movie theaters were great places for people to go to get entertainment. They could watch a movie and go out for supper, without having to worry about their children.

Station EThe Charleston

Directions:1. Read the background info below.2. Answer the questions on your hand out.3. Watch a video tutorial on the Charleston and get ready to dance!

Background:The Charleston dance became popular after appearing along with the song, "The Charleston," by James P. Johnson in the Broadway musical Runnin' Wild in 1923. Although the origins of the dance are obscure, the dance has been traced back to blacks who lived on an island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina (which is why the dance is called "Charleston"). The Charleston dance had been performed in black communities since 1903, but did not become internationally popular until the musical debuted in 1923.

The music for the Charleston is ragtime jazz, in quick 4/4 time with syncopated rhythms. The dance uses both swaying arms and the fast movement of the feet. To begin the dance, one first moves the right foot back one step and then kicks backwards with the left foot while the right arm moves forward. Then both feet and arms are replaced to the start position and the right foot kicks forwards while the right arm moves backwards. This is done with a little hop in between steps. The Charleston dance became extremely popular in the 1920s, especially with Flappers. The dance could be done by oneself, with a partner, or in a group.

Station FThe Harlem Renaissance

Directions: 1. Read the background info below.2. Answer the questions on your handout.3. Read the poem “Democracy” by Langston Hughes and record your

thoughts of this poem on your handout.

Background: The rhythm and themes of jazz inspired the poetry of Langston Hughes, an African American writer. In the 1920’s, Hughes joined the growing number of African American writers and artists who gathered in Harlem, an African American section of New York City.

Harlem witnessed a burst of creativity in the 1920’s—a flowering of African American Culture called the Harlem Renaissance. This movement instilled an interest American culture and pride in being African American. During the Harlem Renaissance, many writers wrote about the African American experience in novels, poems, and short stories. Along with Hughes were writers like James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Station F Directions: Choose one or two people in your group to read this poem “Performance Poetry” Style and write your reactions to the poem on your handout.

**What is performance poetry?Performance poetry means reading or declaiming poetry in a way that acknowledges the presence of an audience. This can be anything from a bit of eye-contact to fully blown histrionics. That is it, basically. There are no rules.

DemocracyBy Langston Hughes

Democracy will not comeToday, this yearNor everThrough compromise and fear.

I have as much right As the other fellow hasTo standOn my two feet And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say, Let things take their course.Tomorrow is another day.I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

FreedomIs a strong seedPlantedIn a great need.

I live here, too.I want freedomJust as you.