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George Herman “Babe” Ruth was a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox when they traded him to the New York Yankees for $400,000. Ruth was one of the first of the celebrity sluggers, he made 54 home runs during the 1920 season. -
As the year 1920 began 8.3 million women worked outside the home, representing about 24% of the national workforce. 10 years later the number of working women was at 10.6 million or 27% of the workforce.
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Leading Jazz artist Joe “King” Oliver took his band on the road to cities like Chicago and New York. Oliver trained many new up-and-coming artists in Jazz including Louis Armstrong.
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Bessie Smith was a singer who sang on personal experiences with sad and soulful tunes. She recorded songs with Armstrong, and at the end of the 1920s Smith was the highest-paid performer in the world -
Radio technology was made possible by the expansion of electricity adding to the entertainment options at home. Because of radio technology, the first radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh went on the air.
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The most popular novelist of the year was Sinclair Lewis who wrote Main Street and Babbitt. He captured small-town life in the Midwest with brutal honesty in his novels. -
Modernism was a popular writing style in the 1920s. It struck as a hard and realistic tone and a tendency to reject or avoid artistic and literary practices of the past.
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Many young women have embraced a freer style of dress and the media has given them a name; flappers. The name came from an illustration in a magazine showing a fashionable young woman whose rubber rain boots were open and flapping, but the real signature look of a flapper was the bobbed hair, her short dress, and the use of cosmetics. -
The most famous football player at the University of Illinois Harold “Red” Grange scored 4 touchdowns in 12 minutes against the University of Michigan. His picture was on the cover of Time magazine featuring news and pop culture. He was paid $12,000 a game at the start of his career in the National Football League. -
Rudolph Valentino died suddenly at the age of 31 many of his fans were shocked. Since so many of his fans saw him and tv and read about him in magazines fans felt as if they lost someone close to them.