Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.” Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that’s due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.

Read how the U.S. government poisoned untold thousands of its citizens in its “Noble Experiment”

‘Slumming’ was the name given to the thousands of white middle class voyeurs crossing boundaries of race, class and sexual orientation to trip into the worlds of the poor on their dorstep. There they learnt to drop the restraints of respectability and savoured an often salatious sense of sex and discovery in the period of prohibition. The jazz raged, the ‘pansies’ preened, but after the party what was the effect on the communities they visitied? Laurie talks to the author of Slumming, Chad Heap, and the writer Bonnie Greer about the impact that the wild white adventuring in urban areas had on sexual and racial politics in America.

Listen to this 30 minute piece from BBC4’s Thinking Allowed

Prohibition was the most ambitious reform ever attempted in American history. It was passed during an optimistic time, when the United States was fighting a war to end all wars and everything seemed possible. Those who supported it predicted radical changes in society. Alcoholism would be forever banished, healthier men and women would spend their days with clear eyes and steady hands, and untold sums of money would be avail able to enrich lives instead of being squandered on drink. What actually happened in our country made a mockery of such prophecies.

Read: Demon Rum by Robert Maddox

Response Sheet to Demon Rum

IN THE year 1906 Woodrow Wilson, who was then president of Princeton University, said, “Nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the automobile,” and added that it offered “a picture of the arrogance of wealth”. Less than twenty years later, two women of Muncie, Indiana, both of whom were managing on small incomes, spoke their minds to investigators gathering facts for that admirable sociological study of an American community, Middletown. Said one, who was the mother of nine children, “We’d rather do without clothes than give up the car.” Said the other, “I’ll go without food before I’ll see us give up the car..’ And elsewhere another housewife, in answer to a comment on the fact that her family owned a car but no bathtub, uttered a fitting theme song for the automobile revolution. “Why,” said she, “you can’t go to town in a bathtub!”

Read The Automobile Revolution

The Automobile Revolution Response Sheet

Douglas Linder on the Trial

Response Sheet to Linder Article

The Debate over Teaching Evolution Persists:

In Ohio

In Kansas

Scopes Trial Socratic Dialogue Questions

Here is my lecture on the Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance
Enjoy

Frederick Lewis Allen was the editor of Harper’s Magazine and also notable as an American historian of the first half of the twentieth century. His specialty was writing about what was at the time recent and popular history. His best-known books were Only Yesterday (1931), a book chronicling American life in the 1920s, and Since Yesterday (1940), which covered the 1930s.

He graduated from Harvard College in 1912 and received his Masters in 1913. He taught at Harvard briefly thereafter before becoming assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1914, and then managing editor of The Century in 1916. He began working for Harper’s in 1923, becoming editor-in-chief in 1941, a position he held until shortly before his death. His wife, Dorothy Penrose Allen, died just prior to the publication of Only Yesterday.

Allen’s popularity coincided with increased interest in history among the book-buying public of the 1920s and 1930s. This interest was met, not by the university-employed historian, but by an amateur historian writing in his free time.

His masterpiece, Only Yesterday, can be read in its entirety courtesy of University of Virginia.

You are assigned to read Chapter Five, A Revolution in Morals and Manners

If you would like to propose a relevant extra credit project in lieu of one of those provided you may do so and I will approve, reject or modify your proposal.

This 1920’s Extra Credit Assignment offers a potential of 10 points. All products will be graded out of 10 possible points. Do your best and have fun.