Internet Field Trip: Heroes, Flappers, and Artists — Remembering the 1920s

On May 20, 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh took off from a rainy airfield in Long Island in a small plane and flew 33½ hours before landing outside Paris. Seventy years later, even though astronauts have walked on the moon, Lindbergh's historic flight still stirs the imagination. At the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, people look with wonder at Lindbergh's plane, the Spirit of St. Louis. His flight was only one of the events and trends that made this decade — the Roaring '20s — memorable.

In the 1920 presidential election, Warren G. Harding called for "normalcy" following World War I, a campaign speech you can hear for yourself on the Web. But the 1920s became instead a time of cultural change, invention, and questioning. People with big dreams, such as B. F. Mahoney, whose fascination with flying led him to invest in an aviation company and build Lindbergh's plane, personify the era. So do the flappers, who broke with fashion convention in the styles they wore. While some women were donning higher skirts, others tossed on flight jackets and challenged barriers to become women pilots.

Artistic expression, from music to literature, flowered among African Americans in the Harlem Renaissance. The decade ended in an anything-but-normal way, as you can understand by reading the newspaper headlines of 1929 about the rising stock prices and the market crash on October 24, 1929 that brought the '20s to a close and ushered in the Great Depression.

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