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The 1920s and 1970s

The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast the 1920s and 1970s, from a social, political, and economic point of view. The plan of the research will be to set forth a historical context from which such comparison can be usefully made, and then to elaborate each aspect of comparison with a view toward suggesting the degree and kinds of patterns of activity that give rise to insight and understanding of the periods in question. The focus will be principally on the United States.

In the history of any decade, there is much interpenetration of social, economic, and political trends, and the experience of such trends pervades the entire culture. Thus the issues informing comparisons of decades become issues of cultural history, and indeed it is not too much to say that the culture issues from history. This seems decisively true in the case of the 1920s, the character and tenor of which issued from World War I, and which "lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that [earlier] time from ours" (Tuchman, 1981, p. xv). By the 1920s for the U.S. and Western Europe, a process of fundamental social and political change had begun that has essentially continued to the present day. Tuchman says that the Great War caused many fundamental changes: "in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychologic gulf between two epochs" (p. xv).

In the social realm, the transformation was consciously revolutionary. Allen cites an Atlantic Monthly article by John F. Carter as "expressing accurately the sentiments of innumerable contemporaries" that the current generation should not accede to a postwar society's morality "with the same attitude of pretty, decorous enthusiasm with which they received it, way back in the 'eighties" (Allen, 1964, p. 79). According to Allen, Carter's generation "had acquired under the pressure of wartime conditions a new code which...

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The 1920s and 1970s. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:56, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1680679.html