Glossary

Fashion

Vogue - a popular fashion magazine, launched in 1893

Bloomers - baggy pants worn by women as active wear

Oxford tie - a narrow straight tie of uniform width, popular with both men and women in the 1890s the

Corset - a tightly laced undergarment worn by wealthy women during the turn of the century to produce an unnaturally thin waist; some styles also produced and S shaped posture

Corselet - a combined brassiere and corset, developed for larger women to achieve the flattened appearance desired of women in the 1920s

Celebrities

Watering stock - inflating a corporation’s assets and profits and then selling its stock

Horizontal integration - a business strategy where a company buys out the competition to form a large corporation

Vertical integration - a business strategy where a company can control every stage of the industrial process by buying up the companies that do the various processing

Comstock Law - a law prohibiting the mailing or transportation of obscene and lewd material or photographs

Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine - a policy made in 1904 that the U.S. would intervene whenever necessary before letting Europeans intervene in Latin America

big-stick diplomacy - Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy to “speak softly and carry a big stick”

dollar diplomacy - Taft’s policy which depended on money from investors to increase U.S. trade abroad instead of expanding by means of battleships

Social Gospel -applying Christian principles to social problems

Pragmatism - defining “truth” and “goodness” as abstract and using a more practical approach to achieving good morals, ideals, and knowledge by experimenting

Muckraker - a writer who specializes in writing investigations on the “dirty” realities of party politics and the scandals of factories and slums

direct primary - a method for nominating party candidates with a majority vote of the people

Golden Rule policy - a program of reform with free kindergarten, night school, and public playgrounds

Committee on Public Information - a propaganda agency that had artists, writers, vaudeville performers, and movie stars volunteer to show the U.S. troops as heroes and the Kaiser as a villain

Big Four - Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, and Vittorio Orlando

Functionalism - the idea in architecture that the form should follow functionality

United Negro Improvement Association - an association supporting black racial pride, economic self-sufficiency, and movement of blacks to Africa

New Deal - programs designed for relief for the jobless, recovery of business and economy, and reform of the U.S. economic institutions

Fireside chats - starting in 1933, FDR went on the radio to assure Americans that the banks were safe for their use

Keynesian theory - the economic theory that deficit spending is acceptable in order to let the economy grow

Fascist - related to Fascism, which is the idea that people should glorify their nation and race via an aggressive display of force

Island hopping -isolating strongly held islands them with naval and air power

Manhattan project - a top secret project started in 1942 by the U.S. to create a new weapon, resulting in the creation of the atomic bomb

Visual Arts

Abstract art - rather than photographic realism, artists tried to paint an idea rather than the form of an object, often resulting in lack of recognizable form

Art deco - decorative art of the 1920s and 1930s, emphasized symmetry and rectilinear forms while utilizing new machine and material technology, harmonizing art with industry

Cubism - created by Picasso and Braque, rejected sensuous appeal and use of light as in Impressionism in favor of depicting the structure of objects using geometric shapes, often from several perspectives at once

Impressionism - "painting light," art with a focus on painting the color and light present in a scene rather than exactitude of form and photorealism

Realism - influenced by photography, characterized by unsentimentalized and sometimes shocking depictions of (usually urban street) scenes portraying life "from the ground up"

Architecture

Balustrade - A railing with supporting columns

Bay Window - A window projecting beyond the wall’s surface

Casement windows - A hinged window that swings open

Clipped Roof - A roof with four sloped sides

Cornices - The top, crowning, projection; crown molding

Cupola - A dome at the top of a building

Façade - The exterior front of a building

Gable - Triangle portion of a wall enclosed by a sloped roof

Hipped Roof - See - Clipped Roof

Lintel - Supporting beam on the top of an opening

Mullions - Vertical strips dividing windows into panes

Palladian Window - A window divided into three rectangles, the middle having an arched section above

Parapet Wall - A low guarding wall before a drop, such as on a roof or balcony

Entertainment

Speakeasies – Bars and saloons that continued to sell alcohol during Prohibition

Talkies – Movies that contained dialogue, instead of their silent counterparts. Introduced in 1920s.

Music

Ragtime - music style developed in late 1800s characterized by irregular rhythms and syncopation

Jazz - music style developed around the turn of the century; based on ragtime, African & European tradtions, and improvisation

Jungle style - jazz style based largely on African rhythms

Blues - improvised music derived from plantation songs; the secular counterpart to spirituals

Harlem Stride - school of piano playing in the 1920s, used jazzier versions of ragtime pieces

Swing - jazzy dance music, the pop music of the 1930s

Be-Bop - complex 1940s takeoff on jazz; characterized by Latin rhythms, unpredictability, syncopation, aggression

Literature

realism - a literary style characterized by its realistic and often pessimistic portrayal of life

muckraking - a type of writing common near the turn of the century aimed at revealing social ills in the hope of causing action

yellow journalism - sensationalist journalism popular in the early 1900s, made famous by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst

Harlem Renaissance - a bloom of talented black writers in New York City's Harlem district in the 1920s