The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s

Lynn Dumenil's The Modern Temper provides a unique perspective into the American Jazz Age.

When most of us take a backward glance at the 1920s, we may think of prohibition and the jazz age, of movies stars and flappers, of Harold Lloyd and Mary Pickford, of Lindbergh and Hoover--and of Black Friday, October 29, 1929, when the plunging stock market ushered in the great depression.

But the 1920s were much more. Lynn Dumenil brings a fresh interpretation to a dramatic, important, and misunderstood decade. As her lively work makes clear, changing values brought an end to the repressive Victorian era; urban liberalism emerged; the federal bureaucracy was expanded; pluralism became increasingly important to America's heterogeneous society; and different religious, ethnic, and cultural groups encountered the homogenizing force of a powerful mass-consumer culture. The Modern Temper brings these many developments into sharp focus.

Author: Lynn Dumenil, Dumenil
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Published: 06/30/1995
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.40w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780809015665


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 06/15/1995 pg. 80
Publishers Weekly 04/24/1995 pg. 67
Kirkus Reviews 04/15/1995 pg. 525

About the Author

Lynn Dumenil, professor of history at Occidental College, earned her Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930. She lives in Venice, California