Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940: How Americans Lived through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The 1920s and 1930s witnessed dramatic changes in American life: growing urbanization, technological innovation, cultural upheaval, and economic disaster. In this book, prize-winning historian David E. Kyvig describes everyday life in these decades, when automobiles and home electricity became commonplace, when radio and the movies became broadly popular. Major national developments from the adoption of woman suffrage and the coming of national prohibition, to the economic collapse of the early 1930s and the subsequent rise of the New Deal are considered in terms of their effects on the daily lives of Americans.

SYNOPSIS

Kyvig (history, Northern Illinois U.) describes how the uncommon events of the 1920s and 1930s changed the lives of the common people of America. The boom of the 1920s standardized much of America's new middle class, but at the fringes were poverty and a host of political and social movements. When the Great Depression hit, standardized middle class daily lives included the folding of the fringes into the center of American life, the shadow of destitution and war, and the combined hope and fear of a larger and more involved government. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Jonathan Yardley - The Washington Post

… [Kivig] drops in a few anecdotes and writes in an agreeably lucid style. He also writes about subjects that should be of immediate interest to all readers: the ways in which the American diet changed during these two decades, the widespread acceptance of cosmetics (previously thought the province of "painted" women), the rise of birth control and divorce, the move to the suburbs.

Washington Post

Kyvig--A Respected Historian...Writes In An Agreeably Lucid Style...About Subjects That Should Be Of Immediate Interest To All Readers...

Atlantic Monthly

Kyvig regularly comes up with illuminating details...and new ways of thinking about familiar subjects.... This is an unusually satisfying book.

Publishers Weekly

What were your grandparents doing in the 1920s and '30s? How did they spend their days and how were they affected by the popular culture? What were their work and domestic lives like? These are the questions Kyvig, a Bancroft Prize winner for Explicit and Authentic Acts and Northern Illinois University history professor, explores probingly in his new study. Kyvig covers everything from the development of the small pick-up truck to the spread of country and western music and shifting practices in religion and health care. He delineates how the mass production of cars changed people's buying habits with the introduction of credit, and how battery-powered radios meant rural folks could share the new mass culture with city dwellers. Kyvig also documents the massive impact-most of it negative-of Prohibition, a sign of the federal government's growing impact on people's lives, an impact greatly heightened by the New Deal. In the midst of his quite lucid and readable analysis, the author also touches on race, gender, class and the differences between rural and urban environments. In sum, Kyvig's book represents a penetrating information-packed portrait of Main Street, USA, during tumultuous times. 53 b&w photos. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Kyvig (Nearby History) hitches us to the rhythms and interests of Americans' work and play for a ride through two decades of social change and political realignment, a time of sometimes surprising resilience in the habits of family and community. This book is a modest revision of the author's well-received Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1939, with a new year added. Instead of focusing on the middle or upper class and on intellectuals alone, Kyvig emphasizes the diversity of experiences. He relies on census data to gauge economic, social, and geographic mobility and makes much of the technological changes afforded by radio and automobile and the spread of movies, which brought Americans together even as race and class divided them. Especially instructive are his case studies of six places-urban and rural-from across America, which show the tenacity of racial, religious, and regional identities. This work lacks the verve of Frederick Lewis Allen's still useful, if somewhat outdated, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s and Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America, but it stands strong on a bedrock of solid research and clear writing. Highly recommended for any library lacking the original.-Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

This enjoyable read brings the period clearly into focus. — Forbes.com

WESLEY G. JOHNSON

...An excellent popular approach to an important subject by a well respected historian. — BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

...Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the origins of contemporary America. — WILLIAM L. O'NEILL

ROGER DANIELS

...An excellent social history which examines how 'ordinary people' reacted to...massive changes. — UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

WILLIAM E. LEUCHTENBURG

...A happy marriage of political and social history. — PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF HISTORY, UNC CHAPEL HILL