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Americans in the early twentieth century moved through a rapidly changing world as industrialization, immigration, and international ties reshaped the landscape of people’s lives.
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The Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, which culminated in the disruptions of World War I. By the time the war came to an end, more and more Americans began to realize they were witnessing a massive cultural shift. This lecture will demonstrate that American culture was, certainly by the 1920s, a modern culture, and that some people embraced changing views on family life, growing diversity, a flourishing urban consumer culture, and the rise of a secular worldview, while others sought to stem the sweeping tide of change, motivated by their religious beliefs, their racial or socioeconomic position, their politics, or their moral stance. In ways that may seem quite familiar to us now, people struggled to find and secure their own place in this newly modern American life.
Dr. Ryan teaches modern American history, including courses on politics, culture, women, gender, and sexuality at Rider University. Dr. Ryan's new book, When the World Broke in Two: the Roaring Twenties and the Dawn of America's Culture Wars, published with Praeger in September 2018. A comprehensive history of America in the 1920s, the book presents the decades most compelling controversies as precursors to today's culture wars. Dr. Ryan published her first book titled Red War on the Family: Sex, Gender, and Americanism in the First Red Scare with Temple University Press in November of 2014. She has also published essays in Encyclopedia of the Jazz Age: 1918-1929 and Notches: Remarks on the History of Sexuality, and written book reviews for American Historical Review, History: Review of New Books, Archives of Sexual Behavior, and the scholarly website Women and Social Movements in the United States.
At the conclusion of the program please feel free to take a brief online survey here: https://www.projectoutcome.org/responses/68118
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