The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s

By Lynn Dumenil

Book Overview

Lynn Dumenil's The Modern Temper provides a unique perspective into the American Jazz Age.

When most of us take a backward glance at the 1920s, we may think of prohibition and the jazz age, of movies stars and flappers, of Harold Lloyd and Mary Pickford, of Lindbergh and Hoover--and of Black Friday, October 29, 1929, when the plunging stock market ushered in the great depression.

But the 1920s were much more. Lynn Dumenil brings a fresh interpretation to a dramatic, important, and misunderstood decade. As her lively work makes clear, changing values brought an end to the repressive Victorian era; urban liberalism emerged; the federal bureaucracy was expanded; pluralism became increasingly important to America's heterogeneous society; and different religious, ethnic, and cultural groups encountered the homogenizing force of a powerful mass-consumer culture. The Modern Temper brings these many developments into sharp focus.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809015668
• ISBN13: 9780809015665
• Release Date: June 1995
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

A Great, Heavy Work on an Important Era

A profoundly integrative study of this American era. A thoughtful, well researched work. Must have edition.