An economic and governmental system based on public ownership of the means of production and exchange.
Back
Prohibition
Front
A nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation and sale of alcoholic beverages that remained in place from 1920 to 1933.
Back
Liberalism
Front
A viewpoint or ideology associated with free political institutions and religious toleration, as well as support for a strong role of government in regulating capitalism and constructing the welfare state.
Back
Herbert Hoover
Front
Republican president at the outset of the Great Depression. As a Republican, he believed that the federal government should not interfere in economic problems; the severity of the Great Depression forced his hand to provide some federal assistance to those in need, but he mostly left these efforts to the states.
Back
Welfare State
Front
A system whereby the government undertakes to protect the health and well-being of its citizens, especially those in financial or social need, by means of grants, pensions, and other benefits. The foundations were laid by the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Back
Sacco and Vanzetti Trial
Front
Italian immigrants charged with murdering a guard and robbing a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts. The trial lasted from 1920-1927. Convicted on circumstantial evidence; many believed they had been framed for the crime because of their anarchist and pro-union activities.
Back
Women's suffrage
Front
The women's right to vote, granted by the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1920).
Back
The Great Migration
Front
The movement of 6 million African-Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1910 and 1970.
Back
Harlem Renaissance
Front
Black literary and artistic movement centered in Harlem that lasted from the 1920s into the early 1930s that both celebrated and lamented black life in America; Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were two famous writers of this movement.
Back
The Great Depression
Front
The deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world. In the United States, it began soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors.
