SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Derek Thompson has republished excerpts from an almost 100-year-old report on what the US was like in the 1920s. He includes some of the charts and summaries.
One hundred years ago, on September 26, 1929, President Herbert Hoover gathered a group of social scientists at the White House. He asked them to begin research on the most detailed report ever produced on the state of the nation. Four years later, running more than 1,500 pages long, Recent Social Trends was published, offering an unusually granular look at life in the mid-1920s.
The document is almost entirely forgotten. But today, for America's 250th birthday, I'm blowing the cobwebs off this sucker and taking readers inside its yellowed pages for a look back at what life was like in the U.S. exactly 100 years ago, when the U.S. was celebrating its sesquicentennial anniversary.
Derek observes some interesting parallels between US society around both the sesquicentennial and the recent semiquincentennial.
A scanned version of Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President's Research Committee on Social Trends is available online having been scanned at the University of California back when scanning old material was still allowed, though there are paper copies there and elsewhere. For now.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JamesWebb on Monday July 06, @03:40AM (2 children)
Thanks for posting this, good stuff.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Monday July 06, @04:09AM
It would be fantastic, 100 years later, to be able to feed all 1500 pages at that fine-grained level, into an AI and let you explore what it says about US life in its various facets, and to match and contrast that with personal/first-hand and other accounts of the time.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mcgrew on Monday July 06, @06:24PM
Here's another one. [mcgrewbooks.com] Only Yesterday, An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen, published in 1933. Most of the italicized words in it are actually links to the referenced antique book, movie, or musical piece.
My Grandma was 17 in 1920 and told me things about that decade not in books, like the so-called "roaring twenties" only roared for the rich. Keep in mind reading it that when it mentions income taxes, before WWII you had to earn over four times the median income to owe any tax at all.
It reminds me of now, only instead of Prohibition we have ICE goons, and Trump and his cabinet are far more crooked than Harding and his.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison