by the early twentieth century, a flood of immigrants had produced a more heterogeneous u.s....
TRANSCRIPT
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
A Nation of Immigrants
By the early twentieth century, a flood of immigrants had produced a more heterogeneous U.S. population.
A Nation of Immigrants
Immigrants came fromChinaJapanEurope
A Nation of Immigrants
The term “melting pot” was coined to describe the emerging American society
Prosperity and Hard Times
By the 1920s, the country had developed a growing middle class.
The splendor of the Roaring Twenties came to an abrupt end in 1929 with the New York Stock Market Crash.
Prosperity and Hard Times
The Great Depression followed this stock market crash.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt expanded the role of the U.S. government to try to bring the country out of the Depression.
Prosperity and Hard Times
Roosevelt’s New Deal started programs that:Increased regulation of banks and
the stock marketCreated jobsEstablished entitlements such as
social security
War and Peace
Although initially hoping to remain neutral, the United States participated in both WWI and WWII.
The atomic bombs dropped on two Japanese cities signaled the beginning of the atomic age.
War and Peace
Growing tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union led to the cold war.
The threat of global destruction gave rise to the description of the times as the “age of anxiety.”
Modern American Literature
The beginnings of modern poetry: Some poets began to use literature as a vehicle for exploring how the psychological and emotional impact of rapid urbanization and technological advancement affected individuals.
Modern American Literature
Edgar Lee Masters and Edward Arlington Robinson expose the discontent and isolation they felt lay in many people’s hearts.
Robert Frost created his response to the conditions of the modern age (he functioned as a Transcendentalist).
Modern American Literature
The Harlem RenaisssanceThe Great Migration: many African
Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North. A large number of these migrants settled in the Harlem section of Manhattan.
Modern American Literature
Harlem became the cultural center of African American lifeWriters, artists, musicians and
intellectuals moved to the areaThis cultural flowering came to be
known as the Harlem Renaissance.
Modern American Literature
Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and others considered themselves the founders of a new era in literature.Looked inwardExpressed what it meant to be
black in a white-dominated world
Modernism
As a literary movement, modernism was a direct response to the forces shaping the twentieth centuryIncreased commercialismConcentrated masses of people in
citiesA rising middle classThe proliferation of pop culture
Modernism
Most modernists saw the such changes in society as a threat to the individual, especially the artist.
The term alienation—meaning a withdrawal from the values of one’s society—became a badge of superiority for the modernist.
Modern American Literature
T.S. Eliot was a giant among modernist writers.Much of his poetry deals with the
spiritual and emotional emptiness that he believed characterized modern society.
Modern American Literature
Fiction writer Sherwood Anderson introduced innovations in the short story with his tightly drawn psychological portraits of characters trapped by their own fears and frustrations.
Modern American Literature
Ernest Hemingway wrote short stories and novels in a distinctive prose style.Shared characteristic alienationProtagonists are primarily men
shattered by war and adrift in Europe.