by the early twentieth century, a flood of immigrants had produced a more heterogeneous u.s....

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.