The Twentieth Century

1. The Twentieth Century

2. A Nation of Immigrants • By the early twentieth century, a flood of immigrants had produced a more heterogeneous U.S. population.

3. A Nation of Immigrants • Immigrants came from • China • Japan • Europe

4. A Nation of Immigrants • The term “melting pot” was coined to describe the emerging American society

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. Prosperity and Hard Times • Roosevelt’s New Deal started programs that: • Increased regulation of banks and the stock market • Created jobs • Established entitlements such as social security

8. 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.

9. 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.”

10. 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.

11. 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).

12. Modern American Literature • The Harlem Renaisssance • The 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.

13. Modern American Literature • Harlem became the cultural center of African American life • Writers, artists, musicians and intellectuals moved to the area • This cultural flowering came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance.

14. Modern American Literature • Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and others considered themselves the founders of a new era in literature. • Looked inward • Expressed what it meant to be black in a white-dominated world

15. Modernism • As a literary movement, modernism was a direct response to the forces shaping the twentieth century • Increased commercialism • Concentrated masses of people in cities • A rising middle class • The proliferation of pop culture

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. Modern American Literature • Ernest Hemingway wrote short stories and novels in a distinctive prose style. • Shared characteristic alienation • Protagonists are primarily men shattered by war and adrift in Europe.