Roaring Twenties Jeopardy

Flappers, Prohibition, the Harlem Renaissance and the 1929 crash on one US history review board. Copy it free and let the class buzz in from their phones.

6 categories · 30 clues · Final Jeopardy · everyone buzzes in from their phone

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Prohibition

$200
These illegal bars, often hidden behind unmarked doors, served alcohol during Prohibition.
What are speakeasies?
$400
Ratified in 1919, this amendment banned the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors.
What is the Eighteenth Amendment?
$600
This Chicago gangster, nicknamed Scarface, was finally convicted in 1931 of income tax evasion.
Who is Al Capone?
$800
This 1919 law, named for a Minnesota congressman, spelled out how Prohibition would be enforced.
What is the Volstead Act?
$1,000
Founded in 1874, this women's organization campaigned against alcohol for decades before Prohibition became law.
What is the Woman's Christian Temperance Union?

The Harlem Renaissance

$200
This poet of The Weary Blues and The Negro Speaks of Rivers was a leading voice of the movement.
Who is Langston Hughes?
$400
This mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities helped fuel the movement.
What is the Great Migration?
$600
This author of Their Eyes Were Watching God studied anthropology and collected Black folklore in the South.
Who is Zora Neale Hurston?
$800
This Jamaican-born founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association promoted Black pride and a return to Africa.
Who is Marcus Garvey?
$1,000
This Howard University philosophy professor edited the influential 1925 anthology The New Negro.
Who is Alain Locke?

Cars, Radio and Movies

$200
This industrialist's Model T became affordable to ordinary families thanks to the moving assembly line.
Who is Henry Ford?
$400
This 1927 film starring Al Jolson was the first feature-length movie with synchronized spoken dialogue.
What is The Jazz Singer?
$600
In 1927 this aviator made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic, from New York to Paris.
Who is Charles Lindbergh?
$800
Walt Disney's 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie, one of the first with synchronized sound, introduced this character.
Who is Mickey Mouse?
$1,000
In November 1920 this Pittsburgh station made a pioneering commercial radio broadcast, reporting presidential election results.
What is KDKA?

Flappers and New Freedoms

$200
Ratified in 1920, this amendment guaranteed women the right to vote.
What is the Nineteenth Amendment?
$400
Named for a South Carolina port city, this energetic dance became a craze of the decade.
What is the Charleston?
$600
This short, cropped women's haircut became a signature look of the flapper.
What is the bob?
$800
This author of The Great Gatsby popularized the name the Jazz Age for the decade.
Who is F. Scott Fitzgerald?
$1,000
First introduced in Congress in 1923, this proposed amendment drafted by Alice Paul sought to guarantee legal equality for women.
What is the Equal Rights Amendment?

Culture Clashes

$200
In this 1925 Tennessee case, a high-school teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution.
What is the Scopes trial?
$400
Refounded in 1915, this white-supremacist group claimed millions of members by the mid-1920s.
What is the Ku Klux Klan?
$600
This wave of fear of communists and anarchists swept the US in 1919 and 1920, leading to raids and deportations.
What is the Red Scare?
$800
These two Italian-born anarchists were executed in 1927 after a murder trial many believed was tainted by prejudice.
Who are Sacco and Vanzetti?
$1,000
This 1924 immigration law set national-origins quotas that sharply limited arrivals from southern and eastern Europe.
What is the Johnson-Reed Act?

Boom and Bust

$200
October 29, 1929, the worst day of the stock market crash, is remembered by this name.
What is Black Tuesday?
$400
This way of paying for a car or radio a little each month let families buy goods they could not afford outright.
What is installment buying?
$600
This practice let investors buy stock with a small down payment, borrowing the rest from a broker.
What is buying on margin?
$800
This Vermont-born president, famous for saying little, led the country through the boom years from 1923 to 1929.
Who is Calvin Coolidge?
$1,000
This wealthy banker served as Treasury Secretary through the decade and pushed to cut income taxes on the rich.
Who is Andrew Mellon?

Final Jeopardy — Constitutional Amendments

Ratified in 1933, this amendment repealed Prohibition, the only time an amendment to the US Constitution has been repealed.

What is the Twenty-first Amendment?

How to run this board

The 1920s packed a lot into ten years: a consumer boom built on cars and credit, a national ban on alcohol that nobody seemed to obey, jazz and the Harlem Renaissance, radio and the movies, fierce arguments over immigration and evolution, and a stock market that went up until it very suddenly did not.

The six columns run from culture to economics, so playing the last column last sets up the Great Depression unit neatly. Teams of three or four sharing one phone keep the buzzing fair and the discussion going.

A useful habit for this decade: after each answer, ask whether it was a sign of change or a reaction against it. The 1920s were both at once, and that tension is what essay questions ask about.

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