Jun 28 2011 10:31 pm
Posted by Sujan under June 30 Assignment
The 1920’s Experience
The city, not the farm, had become the place of national experience. By 1920, four-fifths of the country’s African Americans living outside the South lived in the cities. During the 1920s, urbanization took place on a wider front than ever before. Maturing industrial economies increased the populations of many areas, particularly steel, oil, and automobile centers. Social and cultural diversity continued to be a unique quality of urban life that distinguished cities most sharply from the relative homogeneity of rural and small-town social relations. Leisure activities were another type of consumption mostly supported by city dwellers. In 1923, 300,000 fans attended the six-game World series of baseball between the New York Yankees and the New York Giants. The increase of show business paralleled the rise of sports, maturing with the growth of cities. In the 1920s motion pictures also attracted huge crowds. During 1927-1929, weekly movie attendance reach an estimated 10 million people when at that time nations total population was just over 120 million and total weekly attendance to church was under 60 million. Movies helped to popularize urban culture as nation culture by showing scenes involving diverse city people. In 1920s radio also brought the new world of entertainment and advertising directly into urban homes.
Suburban expansion in the 1920s owed much to the automobile and its related industries. Real estate interests, the construction industry, the auto rubber, and oil industry joined automobile owners in pressing for new roads to facilitate high-speed travel. The building of expressways and parkways encouraged still more suburban migration. In 1920, the growth rate of suburbs exceeded that of the cities for the first time. Many were residential communities for the upper and the middle classes, and others were industrial and mixed-use suburbs where factory workers constituted a fifth or more of the population. 1920s was also witnessed the country’s first suburban shopping center. Due to all of these developments in the 1920s helped the cities to become modern.
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