Describe the economic and cultural changes of the 1920s, including mass consumer culture and the Harlem Renaissance, using primary-source evidence.
The 1920s brought the first mass consumer economy in American history. Henry Ford's moving assembly line, refined by 1913, let Ford cut the Model T's price from around $850 to under $300 by mid-decade, putting car ownership within reach of ordinary families for the first time. Advertising became a sophisticated industry in its own right, and installment buying -- paying in monthly installments rather than cash up front -- let families purchase radios, refrigerators, and cars they could not have afforded outright. Radio broadcasting began commercially in 1920 and reached millions of households within a few years, creating something new: a shared national culture where people across the country listened to the same broadcasts at the same time. Women, having won the vote in 1920, also embraced new social freedoms symbolized by the "flapper" -- shorter skirts, bobbed hair, and a public visibility earlier generations would have found shocking.
Harlem, in New York City, became the center of an extraordinary flowering of Black literature, music, and art known as the Harlem Renaissance. Poet Langston Hughes captured both pride and unresolved anger in poems like "I, Too," which answers the promise of American belonging with the declaration that he, too, is America and will one day be recognized at the table. Novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston documented Black Southern life and language with an anthropologist's eye. Musicians Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong helped make jazz -- a genuinely new American art form rooted in Black musical traditions -- the sound of the decade, drawing white as well as Black audiences to Harlem's clubs. Separately, Marcus Garvey built the largest Black nationalist movement in American history to that point, urging pride in African heritage and, eventually, a return to Africa, before he was deported following a fraud conviction in 1927 -- a reminder that the era's Black political and cultural movements were more than one thing at once.
Mastery looks like: They can explain how mass production and consumer credit changed 1920s life, and name at least two Harlem Renaissance figures with a specific, accurate contribution from each.
Common stumbles: Picturing "the Roaring Twenties" as something every American experienced the same way, without noticing how unevenly the decade's prosperity and freedoms were actually distributed.