American literature - přednášky

Consequences:

• More than 9 million soldiers

• 21 million more were wounded. Civilian casualties caused indirectly by the war numbered close to 10 million.

• The two nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80 percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle.

• The fall of four venerable imperial dynasties—Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey.

• Massive social upheaval

• War also helped to spread one of the world’s deadliest global pandemics, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918

• “The first modern war” – because tactics and means changed, chemical weapons, tanks, machineguns

Roaring twenties - After the WWI

• Also called “jazz era”

• Many Americans were left with a feeling of distrust toward foreigners and radicals, whom they held responsible for the war

• The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the founding of the communists’ Third International in 1919 further fanned American fears of radicalism

• Civil liberties were sometimes grossly violated and many innocent aliens were deported

• General distrust of foreigners, liberal reform movements, and organized labour remained throughout the 1920s

• Many viewed Warren G. Harding’s landslide victory in 1920 as a repudiation of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism and of the reforms of the Progressive era

• Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover expanded the size of his department fourfold in attempts to foster business growth and efficiency and to encourage trade associations and business–labour cooperation

• Secretary of the Treasury drastically cut taxes, especially on the wealthy; he also cut federal spending to reduce the national debt

Calvin Coolidge

• symbol for the era rather than the journalistic terms Jazz Age or Roaring Twenties

• Unsuccessful, outmoded prewar conventions and attitudes

• Women were unwilling to give up their social and economic independence after the war had ended

• When the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, the new “emancipated” woman, the flapper, demanded to be recognized as man’s equal in all areas

• People were working fewer hours a week and earning more money than ever before

• New consumer goods – radios, telephones, refrigerators, and above all the motor car – made life better, and they were easier to buy thanks to a vastly expanded consumer credit system

• Leisure activities became more important, professional sports boomed, and the rapid growth of tabloid newspapers, magazines, movies, and radios enabled millions to share in the exciting world of speakeasies, flappers, and jazz music

• Black culture, especially in music and literature, flourished in many cities such as New Orleans, Memphis, and Chicago but nowhere more than in New York City, site of the Harlem Renaissance

• By 1927 two national radio networks had been formed, the NBC Red Network and the Blue Network (ABC)

• Anti-foreign sentiment led to the revival of the racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan

• A membership of some 5,000,000 and gained control of, or influence over, many city and state governments

• John T. Scopes, a biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was tried for violating a law common to many Southern states prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution

• The passage in 1919 of the Prohibition (Eighteenth) Amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors

  • In 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment brought its repeal