UNIT 4 VOCAB

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

• was an American jazz trumpeter, composer and singer who was one of the pivotal and most influential figures in jazz music. His career spanned from the 1920s to the 1960s, covering many different eras of jazz.

LANGSTON HUGHES

• James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist .He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

• Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

MARCUS GARVEY

• a Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League . He founded the Black Star Line, which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands.

MARCUS COOLIDGE

• John Calvin Coolidge Jr. was the 30th President of the United States. A Republican lawyer from Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of that state.

WARREN HARDING

• was the 29th President of the United States, serving from March 4, 1921 until his death. Although Harding died one of the most popular presidents in history .

AL CAPONE

• Alphonse Gabriel "Al" Capone was an American gangster who attained fame during the Prohibition era as the co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit. His seven-year reign as crime boss ended when he was 33 years old.

SCOPES TRIAL

• The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in 1925 in which a substitute high school teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.

SACCO AND VENZETTI

• Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born US anarchists who were convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company, committed April 15, 1920, in South Braintree, Massachusetts, United States, and were executed by electrocution seven years later at Charlestown State Prison. Both adhered to an anarchist movement that advocated relentless warfare against the government.

VOLSTED ACT

• National Prohibition Act, known informally as the Volstead Act, was enacted to carry out the intent of the Eighteenth Amendment, which established prohibition in the United States.

NATIONAL ORIGINS ACT

• A law that severely restricted immigration by establishing a system of national quotas that blatantly discriminated against immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and virtually excluded Asians.

21ST AMENDMENT

• The Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution repealed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which had mandated nationwide Prohibition on alcohol on January 17, 1920. The Twenty-first Amendment was ratified on December 5, 1933.

18TH AMENDMENT

• of the United States Constitution effectively established the prohibition of alcoholic beverages in the United States by declaring the production, transport, and sale of alcohol (though not the consumption or private possession) illegal.

INSTALLMENT PLANS

• an arrangement for payment by installments.

JAZZ

• a type of music of black American origin characterized by improvisation, syncopation, and usually a regular or forceful rhythm, emerging at the beginning of the 20th century. Brass and woodwind instruments and piano are particularly associated with jazz, although guitar and occasionally violin are also used; styles include Dixieland, swing, bebop, and free jazz.

NAACP

• The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 .

BACK TO AFRICA MOVEMENT

• The Back-to-Africa movement, also known as the Colonization movement or Black Zionism, originated in the United States in the 19th century. It encouraged those of African descent to return to the African homelands of their ancestors.

HARLEM RENAISSANCE

• The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. During this period Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars.

MODEL T

• was an automobile built by the Ford Motor Company from 1908 until 1927. Conceived by Henry Ford as practical, affordable transportation for the common man, it quickly became prized for its low cost, durability, versatility, and ease of maintenance.

LES FAUVES

• loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism.

ART DECO

• an elegant style of decorative art, design and architecture which began as a Modernist reaction against the Art Nouveau style. It is characterized by the use of angular, symmetrical geometric forms.

CUBISM

• an early 20th-century style and movement in art, especially painting, in which perspective with a single viewpoint was abandoned and use was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, and, later, collage.

SURREALISM

• a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

FLAPPERS

• (in the 1920s) a fashionable young woman intent on enjoying herself and flouting conventional standards of behavior.

SPEAKEASY

• (during Prohibition) an illicit liquor store or nightclub.

PROHIBITION

• the prevention by law of the manufacture and sale of alcohol, especially in the US between 1920 and 1933.

FUNDEMENTALISM

• a central or primary rule or principle on which something is based

KU KLUX KLAN

• A secret us organization of white Protestant Americans , who oppose people of other races or religions

EUGENICS

• the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion of its doctrines by the Nazis.

NATIVISM

• the policy of protecting the interests of native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants.

PALMER RAIDS

• The Palmer Raids were a series of raids by the United States Department of Justice intended to capture, arrest and deport radical leftists, especially anarchists, from the United States. The raids and arrests occurred in November 1919 and January 1920 under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

RED SCARE

• A Red Scare is the promotion of fear of a potential rise of communism or radical leftism, used by anti-leftist proponents. In the United States, the First Red Scare was about worker (socialist) revolution and political radicalism.

19TH AMENDMENT

• The 19th amendment is a very important amendment to the constitution as it gave women the right to vote in 1920. You may remember that the 15th amendment made it illegal for the federal or state government to deny any US citizen the right to vote.