I have read a number of Geoffry Perret's history books over the years and claim that he is my favorite historian. The Roaring Twenties was a time of change matched only by the Civil War, then World War Two and the Sixties. Perret starts and ends "America in the Twenties" with a man named Fred E. Beal. Private Beal was at Camp Devens helping to dispose of the 70 to 80 men who died every day from the Spanish Flu instead of training to take part in World War One trench warfare until well after the November 1918 elections.
Yes, the Twenties began during the Great War and ended with FDR...
On Page 272 Perret details the four foundations of modern American fiction: overt concern with sex, preferring the young to their elders, deriding small town ways, and murderous denouement. "Peter Pan" was written by an English playwrite, but fits!
Prohibition, motorized bank robbers, radio, motion pictures (with sound and with color at the end of the era), disarmament treaties, education (John Scopes, anyone?)--you can find most of the major figures of Twenties' America in this volume. As an amateur World War Two historian myself, "America in the Twenties" is important to my research because that is where America's World War Two military people grew up. Billy Mitchell's three correct predictions fell on deaf ears during this period--another European war, a war with Japan, both wars decided by air power--because of the past.
This book has a useful index and a bibliographical essay in addition to notes, so that the serious historian can reference source materials.
(Plot spoiler!) At the end of the book, Frank Beal escapes from the Workers' Paradise in 1933 and after publishing his autobiography denouncing communism is betrayed to the police, spending 1938 to 1942 in prison.
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