Living the Twenties

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The 1920s were surprisingly similar to the 2020s. How can they help us navigate these troubled times?
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Available formats: epub, .mobi (for kindle), PDF

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The 1920s were a lot like us.

1920s people went through dramatic changes that left the world a different place from what it was before. They knew uncertainties and even fears, but also great excitement and potentialities.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
They faced challenges very similar to ours: the changing role of different social groups, a great change in the way people communicate, the intrusion of the machine in everyday life with the consequent depersonalisation. They faced a world that shrunk as it globalised a little more every day and a feeling of loneliness in the new city environments.

It may have been one hundred years ago, but it feels very close to home.

This is why I think that learning about the Twenties and their anxieties may tell us a lot about ourselves, about the insecurities we are facing today, and maybe give us some hope for the future.

 

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.

Bertold Brecht

 

The flapper is one of the most iconic images of the 1920s. She was indeed a force of nature that upturn the way men and women interacted. But was really every 1920s girl a flapper?

“The 1920s” meant as a phenomenon was born and eventually bloomed particularly in the Western World, but they rubbed off on many other societies around the world.
Therefore, while in this book I focus primarily on the American and the European 1920s, I tried to offer glimpses of how this phenomenon manifested in different parts of the world.

It’s interesting how many cultures adopted this new outlook on life and how each culture interpreted it in its own way, according to its agenda. The only thing that I see emerging over and over again is the spur to change, a yearning for greater freedom of expression, and a fascination with everything ‘different’.

The Lost Generation was the generation of youths who, born right before or right after 1900, came of age during the war. Yet their experience was so pervasive and so dramatically altering that even people who never took part in the war adhered to disillusionment and sense of doom of this generation.

The book is organised alphabetically. Every word covers an aspect of the Twenties that characterised it uniquely. It isn’t meant to be exhaustive in any way, but I hope that it will help to give a more complete, more complex image of what was far more than Prohibition, gangsters and gin.

You’ll find here:

  • The New Woman, as she manifested in different parts of the world
  • The aftermath of WWI, which so greatly shaped this decade
  • The pressure of nationalistic ideas in Europe – and elsewhere
  • The many ways in which everyday life changed and became more similar to ours

This is a short book, but I tried to cover all the essential forms of expression that made the 1920s what they were: A very exciting, complex, even problematic time that might have changed the world – even more than it actually did. 

Description

The 1920s were a lot like us.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
1920s people went through dramatic changes that left the world a different place from what it was before. They knew uncertainties and even fears, but also great excitement and potentialities.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
They faced challenges that were very similar to ours: the changing role of different social groups, a great change in the way people communicate, the intrusion of the machine in everyday life with the consequent depersonalisation. They faced a world that shrunk as it globalised a little more every day and a feeling of loneliness in the new city environments.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
In different ways, this is what’s happening to us today. The mode may be different, but the essence and the feeling are just the same.

This short book is meant to give an introduction to the Twenties as a historical moment and a social change.

The Twenties was mostly a Western World phenomenon, but it reached out to other parts of a world that was starting to become globalised. Where possible, I tried to give glimpses of what was happening outside the confines of Europe and the United States.

The book is organised alphabetically. Every word covers an aspect of the Twenties that characterised it uniquely. It isn’t meant to be exhaustive in any way, but I hope that it will help to give a more complete, more complex image of what was far more than Prohibition, gangsters and gin.

The 1920s and the 2020s

One hundred years now separate us from the 1920s, but doesn’t that decade still sound a lot like us? 

Sure, the world, the lifestyle, the knowledge, everything has advanced, and it might look so very different now. What in the 1920s was new and modern and even wild is now commonplace. So commonplace that we take it for granted. We barely give thought to it. 

And still, there is a lot that hasn’t changed. Or rather, that has come back in our lives in a way that we might not have expected. 

In so many ways, we face the same challenges and the same fears and the same insecurities that 1920s people faced. And surprisingly, most of those fears and insecurities come from very similar sources: technical advancements, new social behaviours, a necessary relation to the ‘diverse’, the ‘different‘. 

1920s people often thought that these changes would have cause their civilisation to fall. They were afraid of losing their identity just as much as we are today. 

It felt a very real danger to them – but it didn’t happen. They changed, sure. They evolved. They found new ways. 

Maybe this is what we’ll do as well, beyond all our fears.

What about the 1920s?

The 1920s were years of passage. WWI had destroyed the old world. In the 1920s, people desperately tried to understand what kind of world they were living in now. They experimented a lot. They tried out new languages, new outlooks on life. Society and the concept of what was acceptable change in a way that young people embraced, but older people feared. 

Technology advanced shockingly fast. What at the beginning of the century might have been considered fantasy or science fiction, in the 1920s was real life. 

Exciting as it was, the new world wasn’t all that easy to settle in, not even for those who loved it. People moved a lot, also in response to the destruction caused by WWI. Coming in contact with different people and different cultures was one more challenge. It was one more problem people had to face in a moment where stability and certainties seemed to have vanished. 

Change, that great defining characteristic of the 1920s, created excitement which turned into creativity, but also fears that turned into intolerance. 

The 1920s were times of contradiction. Just like our times. 

Maybe they can teach us something valuable. 

 

 

Additional information

First published

30th December 2020

Approximate page number

76

Available formats

epub, .mobi (for kindle), PDF

1 review for Living the Twenties

  1. Grace Robinson (verified owner)

    A well-researched book about life in the 1920s. It’s arranged alphabetically by topic, and therefore covers a wide variety of subjects of daily life in the Roaring Twenties. A very informative read!

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Good quality.The product is firmly packed.Good service.Very well worth the money.Very fast delivery.

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