Only Yesterday?: An Informal History of the 1920s

A lively, immediate portrait of the decade that transformed modern America.Written while the events of the 1920s were still fresh in public memory, Only Yesterday captures the extraordinary decade between the end of World War I and the Wall Street crash of 1929. Frederick Lewis Allen moves easily from presidents and financiers to flappers, speakeasies, automobiles, radio, advertising, sports, and popular fads, showing how rapidly American life changed during the Roaring Twenties.Allen chronicles Prohibition and Al Capone, the Red Scare, political scandals, changing social and sexual conventions, the Florida land boom, the rise of mass consumer culture, and the seemingly unstoppable stock market. He brings together politics, economics, popular culture, and everyday life to recreate not merely what happened, but what it felt like to live through an era of remarkable prosperity and social upheaval.The story culminates in the speculative frenzy of the late 1920s and the crash that abruptly ended the decade's optimism. First published in 1931, Only Yesterday remains notable for its unusual proximity to the events it describes-a history of the Jazz Age written by someone who had just lived through it.