Audio only

THE JAZZ AGE

America in the Roaring Twenties, 1919–1929By Arthur Whitfield CavendishNarrated by Leo Sloan
Length5h 58m

About this audiobook

THE JAZZ AGE — Audiobook · Narrated by Leo Sloan. 🎧 Listen time: 5 hours 58 minutes Roaring Twenties history — the Jazz Age, Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, the 1929 stock market crash, and the complete narrative history of America in the 1920s, 1919-1929. On the night of November 11, 1918, strangers embraced on Broadway and factory whistles blew across New York's boroughs as the Armistice ended the First World War. America had emerged as the world's dominant economic power — and then chose, emphatically, to turn inward. The decade that followed would be at once brilliant and ugly, creative and fearful, free and violently repressive. It was called, later and with some nostalgia, the Roaring Twenties. The roar was real. So was the silence underneath it. This is the complete story of the Jazz Age — from the Red Summer of 1919, when race riots erupted in 26 cities and the Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed Black Wall Street, to Black Tuesday on October 29, 1929, when the Dow Jones fell and broker loan debt of $8.5 billion began its cascade collapse. Historian Arthur Whitfield Cavendish traces six parts across 24 chapters, following Warren Harding's Teapot Dome corruption, Al Capone's bootleg empire, Alain Locke's Harlem Renaissance, Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, and Herbert Hoover's failed bid to halt the speculation that had pushed the Dow from 63.9 in 1921 to 381.17 in September 1929 — a 497% gain built on 10% margin accounts. Inside this Roaring Twenties history: The Red Summer and Tulsa Massacre — 26 race riots in 1919; white mobs and deputized gunmen burn 35 blocks of Greenwood, killing between 100 and 300 Black Tulsans, leaving 8,000 homeless (Chapters 1, 4) Prohibition and organized crime — from the Noble Experiment's passage to Al Capone's $60-million Chicago operation, and the structural corruption that made Prohibition unenforceable (Chapter 3, 15) The Harlem Renaissance — Philip Payton's Afro-American Realty Company fills Harlem; Alain Locke's 1925 anthology The New Negro names a movement; Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Duke Ellington build a culture (Chapter 9) Radio, film, and the Model T — KDKA's 1920 election broadcast; David Sarnoff builds NBC; Al Jolson's 1927 Jazz Singer makes silent film obsolete; Ford's five-dollar day and 143,000 filling stations reshape American geography (Chapters 6, 7) The stock market boom and crash — Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation falls from $104 to $1.75; Roger Babson's ignored September 1929 warning; Black Tuesday and the $8.5 billion call-money collapse (Chapters 8, 19-20) The Scopes Trial and culture wars — fundamentalism versus modernism in Dayton, Tennessee, and the immigration restriction laws that closed the Golden Door (Chapters 12, 13) The decade's honest reckoning — what the Ku Klux Klan's four-million-member revival, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the farmers' forgotten depression reveal about the America the mythology left out (Chapters 4, 14, 16) The Jazz Age created the mass media, the consumer economy, and a racial reckoning that took another generation to reach. Its prosperity was real; its foundations were not. Understanding both is essential to understanding the America that followed. For listeners of the audiobook of Erik Larson's THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY and Isabel Wilkerson's THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS.

Audiobook details

GenreHistory
Length5 hrs 58 mins
Narrated byLeo Sloan
FormatAudiobook
LanguageEnglish

More from Arthur Whitfield Cavendish

A Brief History of IntelligenceMax S. Bennett12h 18m4.6 (6.6K)$29 · $0.00
Black AF HistoryMichael Harriot15h 43m4.7 (14.6K)$33 · $0.00
The Gulag Archipelago Volume 3Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn21h 56m4.7 (8.9K)$46 · $0.00
Pearl of Great PriceJoseph Smith3h 8m4.7 (7.2K)$1.20 · $0.00
The Happiest Man on EarthEddie Jaku3h 48m4.6 (178K)$7 · $0.00
MotherlandJulia Ioffe17h 52m4.7 (2.5K)$40 · $0.00
Where Cowards Go to DieBenjamin Sledge8h 42m4.7 (351)$20 · $0.00
RevolutionariesSanjeev Sanyal11h 23m4.6 (2.6K)$29 · $0.00
We Crossed a Bridge and It TrembledWendy Pearlman6h4.6 (5.2K)$24 · $0.00
Unbroken Bonds of BattleJohnny Joey Jones8h 31m4.6 (2.6K)$8 · $0.00
The Daughter of AuschwitzTova Friedman, Malcolm Brabant7h 54m4.6 (16.7K)$26 · $0.00
Lily's PromiseLily Ebert, Dov Forman8h 54m4.6 (16.1K)$29 · $0.00
On Democracies and Death CultsDouglas Murray10h 38m4.6 (6.5K)$29 · $0.00
Across the RiverKent Babb11h 40m4.6 (927)$29 · $0.00
Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and BeyondJohn Lyons12h 37m4.6 (1.4K)$33 · $0.00
BeyondStephen Walker15h 39m4.6 (3.2K)$33 · $0.00
Kings and PawnsHoward Bryant10h 9m4.6 (678)$29 · $0.00
No EscapeNury Turkel9h 30m4.6 (809)$28 · $0.00
Jubal Stone: U.S. Marshal: Blood Trail To Hell: A Western Adventure NovelCasey Nash3h 42m4.6 (3.2K)$18 · $0.00
Fall and RiseMitchell Zuckoff17h 23m4.6 (9.8K)$40 · $0.00

You may also like

The Third CoastThomas Dyja17h 45m3.8 (2K)$23
No Treason (Complete Edition)Lysander Spooner3h 52m4.3 (3.9K)$1.99 · $0.00
Empire of MudJ. D. Dickey9h 21m3.7 (1K)$20
Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (Annotated)Ida B. Wells-Barnett2h 44m4.6 (1.3K)$2 · $0.00
ShamelessBrian Tyler Cohen4h 38m4.5 (4.3K)$5 · $0.00
Open SeasonBen Crump7h 57m4.4 (1.2K)$26 · $0.00
NobodyMarc Lamont Hill6h 5m4.4 (2.8K)$20
The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn25h 56m4.5 (25.1K)$8 · $0.00
Adios, AmericaCoulter, Ann12h 51m4.0 (4.6K)Free
Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its PhasesIda B. Wells-Barnett59m4.4 (990)Free
The Gulag Archipelago Volume 3Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn21h 56m4.7 (8.9K)$46 · $0.00
The Abolition of SexKara Dansky4h 8m4.5 (442)$15 · $0.00
No TreasonLysander Spooner3h 5m4.4 (1.2K)$1 · $0.00
Trickle Up PovertyMichael Savage12h 23m4.0 (1.6K)$29 · $0.00
The Breakdown of Higher EducationJohn M. Ellis7h 47m4.2 (296)$17 · $0.00
Jihad AcademyNicolas Hénin4h 28m4.0 (405)$14
Noli me tangereJosé Rizal19h 35m4.3 (29.4K)$4 · $0.00
Bad NewsBatya Ungar-Sargon7h 50m4.1 (981)$20 · $0.00
Open Letter to President McKinley by Colored People of MassachusettsColored National League24m$1 · $0.00
The Ultimate CriminalArchibald Henry Grimké41m$2 · $0.00