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canopic jug writes:

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.

Original Submission