American History Decades project/Hunt: Home

Objective: Students will research various aspects of American culture and politics during their assigned decade (the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's and 1950's). This will provide for students to work both independently and collaboratively, honing their research, writing and presentation skills.

Project Goals:

• This project should provide the audience with an overall idea of what happened during that decade, and an idea of what it was like to live during that time period.
• After researching the topic, students will need to determine the format the project will take, such as Prezi, Google slides, Keynote or Powerpoint. Whatever the format chosen by a group, the presentation should make use of multimedia and be colorful, engaging and interactive. Use text, pictures, music, video and be creative; really try to think "outside of the box."
• The presentation will take 3-7 minutes,

1. Students will work in small groups, i.e. the 1920's group will work together, the 1930's group will work together, and so on.
2. Each group member will select an aspect/aspects of their era (see topics below) to research independently.
3. Each group member must read at least three scholarly sources (i.e. articles by professional scholars from academic journals or selected chapters from books written by professional scholars).
4. Each group member will choose one of their three scholarly sources and write one annotated bibliography.
5. Each project should include information on the following:

• Fashion/Clothing/Hairstyles (men and women)
• Music
• Entertainment/Recreation/Leisure/Popular Culture
• Economics
• Inventions/Technology/Innovations

Groups will write a brief report about their decade, devoting about two paragraphs to each of the topics listed above using data gleaned from each member's three scholarly sources. Therefore, a group with four members will have a total of twelve scholarly sources from which to draw information for their written report. Reports must be properly formatted using footnotes and bibliographies in the Chicago Manual of Style. All group members must partake in researching and putting the project together and identify who did what on the final project.

Getting started:

Use your Foner textbook to help you find good scholarly sources. Skim over the readings in each chapter to help you think about data to explore for your topics. A list of scholarly sources, "review questions" and useful websites can be found at the back of each chapter.

• For the Twenties see p. 796
• For the Thirties see p. 838
• For the Forties see p. 882
• For the Fifties see p. 916

Mr. Hunt