Anxious Decades

No two decades have done more to shape the character of late 20th-century American life that the 1920s and 1930s, when prosperity and depression deeply transformed society. These were the years when the new mass consumer culture of the Roaring Twenties - the automobile, electricity, radio, motion pictures and advertising - fundamentally altered how Americans worked and played, how they ate and dressed, and how they thought about themselves and saw one another. These were the years when the Great Depression shook the country's faith in traditional values and institutions, when women first did battle for an equal rights amendment, when prohibition came in and went out, and when Franklin D. Roosevelt became "commander in chief of a generation". Other books in this series are "Pivotal Decades 1900-20" and "The Proud Decades 1941-60".