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1. Prohibition had been tried before.

In the early 19th century, religious revivalists and early teetotaler groups like the American Temperance Society campaigned relentlessly against what they viewed as a nationwide scourge of drunkenness. The activists scored a major victory in 1851, when the Maine legislature passed a statewide prohibition on selling alcohol. A dozen other states soon instituted "Maine Laws" of their own, only to repeal them a few years later after widespread opposition and riots from grog-loving citizens (Kansas later instituted a separate ban in 1881). Calls for a "dry" America continued into the 1910s, when deep-pocketed and politically connected groups such as the Anti-Saloon League and the Women's Christian Temperance Union gained widespread support for anti-alcohol legislation on Capitol Hill.

2. World War I helped turn the nation in favor of Prohibition.

Prohibition was all but sealed by the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, but the conflict served as one of the last nails in the coffin of legalized alcohol. Dry advocates argued that the barley used in brewing beer could be made into bread to feed American soldiers and war-ravaged Europeans, and they succeeded in winning wartime bans on strong drink. Anti-alcohol crusaders were often fueled by xenophobia, and the war allowed them to paint America's largely German brewing industry as a threat. "We have German enemies in this country, too," one temperance politician argued. "And the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the most menacing, are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz and Miller."

3. It wasn't illegal to drink alcohol during Prohibition.

The 18th Amendment only forbade the "manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors"-not their consumption. By law, any wine, beer or spirits Americans had stashed away in January 1920 were theirs to keep and enjoy in the privacy of their homes. For most, this amounted to only a few bottles, but some affluent drinkers built cavernous wine cellars and even bought out whole liquor store inventories to ensure they had healthy stockpiles of legal hooch.

4. Some states refused to enforce Prohibition.

Along with creating an army of federal agents, the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act stipulated that individual states should enforce Prohibition within their own borders. Governors resented the added strain on their public coffers, however, and many neglected to appropriate any money toward policing the alcohol ban. Maryland never even enacted an enforcement code, and eventually earned a reputation as one of the most stubbornly anti-Prohibition states in the Union. New York followed suit and repealed its measures in 1923, and other states grew increasingly lackadaisical as the decade wore on. "National prohibition went into legal effect upward of six years ago," Maryland Senator William Cabell Bruce told Congress in the mid-1920s, "but it can be truly said that, except to a highly qualified extent, it has never gone into practical effect at all."

5. Drug stores continued selling alcohol as "medicine."

The Volstead Act included a few interesting exceptions to the ban on distributing alcohol. Sacramental wine was still permitted for religious purposes (the number of questionable rabbis and priests soon skyrocketed), and drug stores were allowed to sell "medicinal whiskey" to treat everything from toothaches to the flu. With a physician's prescription, "patients" could legally buy a pint of hard liquor every ten days. This pharmaceutical booze often came with seemingly laughable doctor's orders such as "Take three ounces every hour for stimulant until stimulated." Many speakeasies eventually operated under the guise of being pharmacies, and legitimate chains flourished. According to Prohibition historian Daniel Okrent, windfalls from legal alcohol sales helped the drug store chain Walgreens grow from around 20 locations to more than 500 during the 1920s.

6. Winemakers and brewers found creative ways to stay afloat.

While many small distilleries and breweries continued to operate in secret during Prohibition, the rest had to either shut their doors or find new uses for their factories. Yuengling and Anheuser Busch both refitted their breweries to make ice cream, while Coors doubled down on the production of pottery and ceramics. Others produced "near beer"-legal brew that contained less than 0.5 percent alcohol. The lion's share of brewers kept the lights on by peddling malt syrup, a legally dubious extract that could be easily made into beer by adding water and yeast and allowing time for fermentation. Winemakers followed a similar route by selling chunks of grape concentrate called "wine bricks."

7. Thousands died from drinking tainted liquor.

Enterprising bootleggers produced millions of gallons of "bathtub gin" and rotgut moonshine during Prohibition. This illicit hooch had a famously foul taste, and those desperate enough to drink it also ran the risk of being struck blind or even poisoned. The most deadly tinctures contained industrial alcohol originally made for use in fuels and medical supplies. The federal government had required companies to denature industrial alcohol to make it undrinkable as early as 1906, but during Prohibition it ordered them to add quinine, methyl alcohol and other toxic chemicals as a further deterrent. Coupled with the other low-quality products on offer from bootleggers, this tainted booze may have killed more than 10,000 people before the repeal of the 18th Amendment.

8. The Great Depression helped fuel calls for a repeal.

By the late 1920s, Americans were spending more money than ever on black market booze. New York City boasted more than 30,000 speakeasies, and Detroit's alcohol trade was second only to the auto industry in its contribution to the economy. With the country bogged down by the Great Depression, anti-Prohibition activists argued that potential savings and tax revenue from alcohol were too precious to ignore. The public agreed. After Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a repeal during the 1932 presidential campaign, he won the election in a landslide. Prohibition was dead a year later, when a majority of states ratified the 21st Amendment repealing the 18th. In New Orleans, the decision was honored with 20 minutes of celebratory cannon fire. Roosevelt supposedly marked the occasion by downing a dirty martini.

9. Drinking decreased during Prohibition.

The "Roaring Twenties" and the Prohibition era are often associated with unchecked use and abuse of alcohol, yet the statistics tell a different tale. According to a study conducted by M.I.T. and Boston University economists in the early 1990s, alcohol consumption actually fell by as much as 70 percent during the early years of the "noble experiment." The levels jumped significantly in the late-1920s as support for the law waned, but they remained 30 percent lower than their pre-Prohibition levels for several years after the passage of the 21st Amendment.

10. It continues in some parts of the country to this day.

Even after the repeal of Prohibition, some states maintained a ban on alcohol within their own borders. Kansas and Oklahoma remained dry until 1948 and 1959, respectively, and Mississippi remained alcohol free until 1966-a full 33 years after the passage of the 21st Amendment. To this day, 10 states still contain counties where alcohol sales are prohibited outright.

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10 Things You Should Know About Prohibition

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In the early 19th century, religious revivalists and early teetotaler groups like the American Temperance Society campaigned relentlessly against what they viewed as a nationwide scourge of drunkenness. The activists scored a major victory in 1851, when the Maine legislature passed a statewide prohibition on selling alcohol.

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Flagpole Sitting

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His name was Alvin Kelly but he was best known as "Shipwreck" Kelly.

Employed as a professional stuntman in Hollywood, Kelly decided to attempt to sit on a flagpole in response to a dare from a Hollywood friend. He sat upon the pole for 13 hours and 13 minutes and began a national spectacle.

Kelly's stunt occurred in 1924 and within weeks hundreds of people were trying to call themselves the "King of the Pole." One man sat for 12 days, another for 17 and another for 21 days. Public fascination was phenomenal as huge crowds would gather to watch the participant. With such a large audience, the publicity-hungry Kelly decided that he must once again be King. In Atlantic City, New Jersey, Kelly sat atop a flagpole for a record 49 days in front of an audience of 20,000 admirers.

Flagpole sitting died out around 1929 with the coming of the Depression, but during its time, it certainly caught the nation's fancy.

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Flagpole Sitting - The Bad Fads Museum | The Badfads Museum

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Employed as a professional stuntman in Hollywood, Kelly decided to attempt to sit on a flagpole in response to a dare from a Hollywood friend. He sat upon the pole for 13 hours and 13 minutes and began a national spectacle.

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Jazz and early recordings

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Music, Poetry, Writers

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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With the end of the Civil War in 1865, hundreds of thousands of African Americans newly freed from the yoke of slavery in the South began to dream of fuller participation in American society, including political empowerment, equal economic opportunity, and economic and cultural self-determination.

Unfortunately, by the late 1870s, that dream was largely dead, as white supremacy was quickly restored to the Reconstruction South. White lawmakers on state and local levels passed strict racial segregation laws known as "Jim Crow laws" that made African Americans second-class citizens. While a small number of African Americans were able to become landowners, most were exploited as sharecroppers, a system designed to keep them poor and powerless. Hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) perpetrated lynchings and conducted campaigns of terror and intimidation to keep African Americans from voting or exercising other fundamental rights.

With booming economies across the North and Midwest offering industrial jobs for workers of every race, many African Americans realized their hopes for a better standard of living-and a more racially tolerant environment-lay outside the South. By the turn of the 20th century, the Great Migration was underway as hundreds of thousands of African Americans relocated to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York. The Harlem section of Manhattan, which covers just three square miles, drew nearly 175,000 African Americans, giving the neighborhood the largest concentration of black people in the world. Harlem became a destination for African Americans of all backgrounds. From unskilled laborers to an educated middle-class, they shared common experiences of slavery, emancipation, and racial oppression, as well as a determination to forge a new identity as free people.

The Great Migration drew to Harlem some of the greatest minds and brightest talents of the day, an astonishing array of African American artists and scholars. Between the end of World War I and the mid-1930s, they produced one of the most significant eras of cultural expression in the nation's history-the Harlem Renaissance. Yet this cultural explosion also occurred in Cleveland, Los Angeles and many cities shaped by the great migration. Alain Locke, a Harvard-educated writer, critic, and teacher who became known as the "dean" of the Harlem Renaissance, described it as a "spiritual coming of age" in which African Americans transformed "social disillusionment to race pride."

The Harlem Renaissance encompassed poetry and prose, painting and sculpture, jazz and swing, opera and dance. What united these diverse art forms was their realistic presentation of what it meant to be black in America, what writer Langston Hughes called an "expression of our individual dark-skinned selves," as well as a new militancy in asserting their civil and political rights.

Among the Renaissance's most significant contributors were intellectuals W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Cyril Briggs, and Walter Francis White; electrifying performers Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson; writers and poets Zora Neale Hurston, Effie Lee Newsome, Countee Cullen; visual artists Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage; and an extraordinary list of legendary musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ivie Anderson, Josephine Baker, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and countless others.

At the height of the movement, Harlem was the epicenter of American culture. The neighborhood bustled with African American-owned and run publishing houses and newspapers, music companies, playhouses, nightclubs, and cabarets. The literature, music, and fashion they created defined culture and "cool" for blacks and white alike, in America and around the world.

As the 1920s came to a close, so did the Harlem Renaissance. Its heyday was cut short largely due to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and resulting Great Depression, which hurt African American-owned businesses and publications and made less financial support for the arts available from patrons, foundations, and theatrical organizations.

However, the Harlem Renaissance's impact on America was indelible. The movement brought notice to the great works of African American art, and inspired and influenced future generations of African American artists and intellectuals. The self-portrait of African American life, identity, and culture that emerged from Harlem was transmitted to the world at large, challenging the racist and disparaging stereotypes of the Jim Crow South. In doing so, it radically redefined how people of other races viewed African Americans and understood the African American experience.

Most importantly, the Harlem Renaissance instilled in African Americans across the country a new spirit of self-determination and pride, a new social consciousness, and a new commitment to political activism, all of which would provide a foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In doing so, it validated the beliefs of its founders and leaders like Alain Locke and Langston Hughes that art could be a vehicle to improve the lives of the African Americans.

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A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance

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Between the end of World War I and the mid-1930s, African Americans produced one of the most significant eras of cultural expression in the nation's history-the Harlem Renaissance.

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The 1920s in America were known as the "Roaring Twenties." But for the National Football League, that 10-year period could be remembered more accurately as the "Tempestuous Twenties."

A major problem with the early-day NFL was that its member teams were primarily situated in small cities which were unable to generate enough fan support to make the teams financially successful.

Teams like the Kenosha Maroons, Racine Legion, Rochester Jeffersons and Canton Bulldogs all at one time were in the NFL. While most small-city teams faced financial failure, some, like the Canton Bulldogs, were winners on the field. The Bulldogs won back-to-back NFL titles in 1922 and 1923.

Several other now-defunct 1920s. One such team was the Providence Steam Roller, which in 1928 became the last team not now in the NFL to capture a league title. Though organized in 1916, the Steam Roller did not join the NFL until 1925. In the next seven years, the team not only won a championship but also established three NFL "firsts."

Providence was the first NFL team to play its home games in a bicycle racing stadium; first to host an NFL game at night under floodlights; and the first to play four regular-season games in six days.

The Steam Roller's home field was the 10,000 seat Cyclodome, which had been built in 1925 by a sports promoter and part-owner of the team, Pete Laudati. Since the Cyclodome's primary function was to serve as a racing stadium, the fct teams enjoyed their "moments in the sun" in football field was snugly surrounded by a wooden track with steeply-banked ends, which cut sharply into the end zones and reduced them to just five yards in depth. On game day, temporary seating was permitted on the straight-away portion of the track, which was so close to the field that players, after being tackled, often found themselves two or three rows deep in the stands.

The year following their 1928 championship, the Steam Roller established two more NFL "firsts." In the six-day period between November 5 and November 10, 1929, Providence played four games. The marathon string began against the Staten Island Stapletons, continued against the Chicago Cardinals and concluded with a two-game series against the Frankford Yellow Jackets. Although the Steam Roller made history, their 0-3-1 record for the six-day stretch proved the folly of their scheduling.

The Steam Roller's other "first" occurred during the second game of that four-game fiasco. When Providence hosted the Cardinals on November 6, the game was played at night at nearby Kinsley Park Stadium, where floodlights recently had been installed. The teams had originally been scheduled to play on Sunday, November 3, but heavy rains made the Cyclodome field unplayable. Since neither team wanted to lose a payday, the historic night game was hastily scheduled.

Although the Steam Roller lost 16-0, the game was declared a success because 6,000 fans attended. The local newspaper reported that the ball, which had been painted white for the night game, "had the appearance of a large egg," and whenever either team passed, "there was a panicky feeling that the player who made the catch would be splattered with yellow yolk." The "monster floodlights," the newspaper concluded was "just as good as daylight for the players." The next year, floodlights were permanently installed in the Cyclodome.

While night football did not become an immediate rage in the NFL, the innovation did affect at least one Providence player directly. According to his 1930 contract which is now in the Hall of Fame archives, Tony Latone was paid $125 for all NFL daylight games and 60 percent of that sum for NFL "floodlight" games. Former team executive Pearce Johnson explained that the pay reduction for night games was arranged to help pay the installation costs of the floodlights.

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Decade by Decade The 1920s and Providence | Pro Football Hall of Fame

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The 1920s in America were known as the "Roaring Twenties." But for the National Football League, that 10-year period could be remembered more accurately as the "Tempestuous Twenties." A major problem with the early-day NFL was that its member teams were primarily situated in small cities which were unable to generate enough fan support to make the teams financially successful.

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Say it isn't so, Joe!

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FanBuzz - Sports News - NFL | NCAA | NBA | WWE

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From the dead ball era of the early 1900s to whatever you want to call the era Dock Ellis threw his LSD no-hitter in to the steroid era that featured Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, United States professional baseball has evolved unfathomably throughout history.

America's Pastime has survived strikes. It's survived wars. It's survived any curveball or screwball Father Time has thrown at it. But one thing has always remained constant in baseball: Cheaters never prosper, at least not in Cooperstown.

Not only will some of baseball's greatest players of all time not be enshrined in the Hall of Fame any time soon, the sport's all-time hit king - Pete Rose - hasn't received a golden plaque because of his infamous gambling scandal.

Seventy years before Rose bet on games, an even bigger baseball scandal - The Chicago Black Sox - rocked the entire sport and forever changed how Major League Baseball operated while setting the precedent for Rose and anyone else who broke the rules.

It also spawned one of the great baseball movies of all time, which you should totally see if you haven't: Field of Dreams.

The year is 1919. Baseball's dead ball era is on its way out thanks to the transcendent play of Babe Ruth, who clubbed an unheard of 29 homers that year. Jackie Robinson wouldn't break baseball's color barrier for another 28 years. Times were...different.

The Chicago White Sox were one of the best teams in baseball. They won the 1917 World Series and after a subpar 1918 season, replaced manager Pants Rowland with Kid Gleason. Under Gleason and stars like Shoeless Joe Jackson, the White Sox returned to dominance. By regular season's end they were 88-52.

But on Sept. 21, a meeting took place that changed everything about their season, careers and lives.

A number of starting players gathered in first baseman Chick Gandil's room at the Ansonia Hotel in New York. Gandil was mean, tough, strong and filled out every bit of of his 6-foot-2, 195-pound frame. Think of him as the operation's ringleader.

The idea: To lose the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds on purpose, in exchange for as much as $100,000 (worth almost $1.5 million today) from gamblers. Rumored conspirators who orchestrated the fix included former ballplayers "Sleepy Bill" Burns and Bill Maharg, as well as New York mob leader Arnold Rothstein, Boston gambler Joseph "Sport" Sullivan and boxer Abe Attell.

Not every White Sox player was in on it. The "Clean Sox" like second baseman Eddie Collins, catcher Ray Schalk and pitchers Red Faber and Dickey Kerr didn't associate with Gandil's group even on the field and in the locker room.

The entire White Sox team may have been winning on the field, but it was in shambles off of it. Nearly everyone hated White Sox owner Charles Comiskey. Inducted into the Hall of Fame as an executive, Comiskey was known for underplaying players and being stingy. One time when star White Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte was closing in on 30 wins in one season - a feat that would've triggered a $10,000 bonus - Comiskey told Gleason to bench Cicotte to "protect his arm."

Cicotte also happened to start Game 1 of that memorable Winter Classic after Faber fell ill with the flu. After firing a called strike to Cincinnati leadoff hitter Morrie Rath, he beaned him in the back on pitch No. 2. That was the signal. The fix was on.

Prior to the game, press box members like sportswriter Hugh Fullerton of the Chicago Herald and Examiner and former player Christy Mathewson agreed to compare notes of any suspicious plays they found.

"I confided my information to Christy Mathewson, one of the most famous and most honest of players and managers ... Neither of us believed the reports true. Yet we watched every game and every play, and in the eight games we marked as "suspicious" just seven plays. Any one of those plays could be explained on the theory that the mistakes were honestly made, as well as on the theory of dishonesty. Plainly the outsider cannot tell to a certainty." - Hugh Fullerton in 1920.

In the fourth inning, Cicotte made a bad throw to Charles "Swede" Risberg that prevented an inning-ending double play. He went on to give up five runs that inning and finished allowing six runs over 3 2/3 innings in the 9-1 loss. Burns would later testify that Cicotte said he would've chucked the ball clear out of the stadium if needed to lose.

The Reds won Game 2 as well despite being outhit and making more errors than the White Sox. Chicago starting pitcher Lefty Williams lost that game and two more in the series, which set a World Series record.

After Game 5, the Reds led the series 4-1. The Black Sox hadn't received some of their promised money from gamblers and attempted to double cross them by winning Game 6 and 7.

Before Game 8 at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois, players were threatened. Williams, who was starting the pivotal game, was visited by an anonymous hitman, according to Eliot Asinof's book Eight Men Out. He took the mound and was shelled for four runs in the first inning. Cincinnati won the ball game, 10-5, and the series.

The 1920 season played out normally until news broke in August that a game between the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies was fixed. That led to the grand jury investigation of the 1919 World Series and a trial the following year.

Eight players were named - they became known as the "Eight Men Out" - though all were found not guilty by the jury.

Following the scandal, baseball was in trouble. The sport's reputation was damaged and the future of the game in jeopardy. League owners decided to appoint one single commissioner of baseball - lifelong baseball fan and federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis - in charge of the league instead of a three-member national commission.

Landis brought the hammer down on the Black Sox. He banned the eight players from MLB and organized baseball for life despite their acquittals in court. Not only did this drastically change those players' lives, it changed MLB by establishing the powers the commissioner has.

These were the eight members of the Chicago White Sox banned:

Arnold "Chick" Gandil, first baseman

Eddie Cicotte, pitcher

Oscar "Happy" Felsch, center fielder

"Shoeless" Joe Jackson, outfielder

Fred McMullin, infielder

Charles "Swede" Risberg, shortstop

George "Buck" Weaver, third baseman

Claude "Lefty" Williams, pitcher

St. Louis Browns' Joe Gedeon was also banned for placing bets on the World Series when he learned of the fix. So too was New York Giants' Hal Chase for his rumored involvement in the plot.

Comsikey suspended his players while his team was fighting for the 1920 American League pennant, which they lost to the Indians. Gleason and each of the "Clean Sox" received $1,500 bonus checks for not conspiring.

Of course, part of Landis' decision is controversial to this day. "Shoeless" Joe Jackson was one of the best hitters in the league and would have undoubtedly been a Hall-of-Famer. His involvement in the scandal is still widely disputed. The Eight Men Out said he was never at meetings and he claimed he was innocent until he died, though Jackson admitted to taking $5,000. He also never learned to read or write and may have been easily taken advantage of by his teammates.

Scandals are a part of every pro sport. This one just happened to be the biggest in baseball history. The Black Sox Scandal led to a single baseball commissioner, changing the World Series from a best-of-nine format to a best-of-seven, and set the precedent for cheaters and rule-breakers.

Alongside Jackson, Rose has been waiting outside the door of the Hall of Fame since he was banned for betting on games as the Reds manager. The two may never get in, but they're just as much a part of baseball's history as Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds.

One hundred years after the 1919 Black Sox fixed the World Series, let's be thankful the biggest concerns in 2019 are bad umpiring and slow pace of play.

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How the "Black Sox Scandal" Changed Baseball Forever

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From the dead ball era of the early 1900s to whatever you want to call the era Dock Ellis threw his LSD no-hitter in to the steroid era that featured Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, United States professional baseball has evolved unfathomably throughout history. America's Pastime has survived strikes.

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This article is from the archive of our partner .
Prohibition be damned, words were just better in the 1920s. There's a fascinating piece today in the New York Times from Edward Rothstein about the new prohibition exhibition at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center that's well worth a read if you're interested in things booze and 1920s, and of course about that truly weird little legal time in our country's history. But of extra-special interest to me in this article was the following note about the exhibition:

On small tables like those at which "zozzled" (drunk) flappers and "jelly beans" (their boyfriends) once illegally imbibed "foot juice" (cheap wine) or "jag juice" (hard liquor), you can read explanations of speakeasy slang.

Speakeasy slang! Language was truly so much more evocative then, wasn't it? If you don't request extra foot juice tonight at that dive bar where you order the subpar pinot grigio, you are doing something wrong. In honor of this exhibition, I've scoured the Internet for a list of twenties-era words and phrases that we need to add to our contemporary conversations. Did you know that in the '20s, bimbo was used to mean "a tough guy"; butt me was "to take a cigarette"; and handcuff and manacle meant engagement and wedding ring? A person who was divorced was out on parole, a gimlet was "a chronic bore," and the exclamation "Nerts!" meant "I am amazed." Herewith, a dictionary of awesome twenties slang.

Applesauce. Remember how we were going on and on about malarkey, thanks to Joe Biden's use of it in the vice presidential debate, the other week? Applesauce is a synonym. Use it to demonstrate your lack of appreciation for the words of another. Or, alternatively, shout horsefeathers.

Bee's knees. No dictionary of twenties slang would be complete without this one, which means, in simple terms, the best. (Synonym: That's the berries.) In related bee-talk, say something is "none of your beeswax" when someone who is not the bee's knees is butting into your beeswax. Where did "bee's knees" come from? From World Wide Words, "It's sometimes explained as being from an Italian-American way of saying business or that it's properly Bs and Es, an abbreviation for be-alls and end-alls. Both are without doubt wrong. Bee's knees is actually one of a set of nonsense catchphrases from 1920s America, the period of the flappers, speakeasies, feather boas and the Charleston." (Other such phrases: " elephant's adenoids, cat's miaow, ant's pants, tiger's spots, bullfrog's beard, elephant's instep, caterpillar's kimono, turtle's neck, duck's quack, duck's nuts, monkey's eyebrows, gnat's elbows, oyster's earrings, snake's hips, kipper's knickers, elephant's manicure, clam's garter, eel's ankle, leopard's stripes, tadpole's teddies, sardine's whiskers, canary's tusks, pig's wings, cuckoo's chin, and butterfly's book.")

Recommended Reading

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How to Sound Like the Bee's Knees: A Dictionary of 1920s Slang

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This article is from the archive of our partner . Prohibition be damned, words were just better in the 1920s. There's a fascinating piece today in the New York Times from Edward Rothstein about the new prohibition exhibition at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center that's well worth a read if you're interested in things booze and 1920s, and of course about that truly weird little legal time in our country's history.

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Women got the vote and look out!

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Dance Marathons

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To print the story please do so via the link in the story toolbar.

Did you know?

Since some churches saw dancing as a sinful act, dance marathons were often referred to as "walkathons"

Did you know?

After the Great Depression began, dance marathons were soon banned because of the dark and exploitative intentions behind the activity.

Arbuckle, Alex. "The Great Depression Dance Marathons That Lasted Months At A Time." Mashable. N. p., 2018. Web. 1 Mar. 2018.

Becker, Paula. "HistoryLink.org." Dance Marathons of the 1920s and 1930s , 25 Aug. 2003, www.historylink.org/File/5534.

Ciesielski, Amy. "The Dance Marathon Fad Of The 1920S And 1930S - Moving Image Research Collections." Library.sc.edu. N. p., 2018. Web. 22 Feb. 2018.

"Dance Marathon Launches Fundraising App." Dance Marathon. N. p., 2018. Web. 27 Feb. 2018.

Vonow, Brittany. "Harrowing Photos Reveal The Deadly 1920S Dance Marathons Where Contestants Fainted." The Sun. N. p., 2017. Web. 1 Mar. 2018.

Watson, Sonny. "Dance Marathons - Aka Continuos Motion Derbies And Pageants Of Fatique Main1." Streetswing.com. N. p., 2018. Web. 1 Mar. 2018.

Did you know?

The longest dance marathon during the 1920s and 1930s was almost 6 months.

Did you know?

Since some churches saw dancing as a sinful act, dance marathons were often referred to as "walkathons"

Did you know?

After the Great Depression began, dance marathons were soon banned because of the dark and exploitative intentions behind the activity.

Arbuckle, Alex. "The Great Depression Dance Marathons That Lasted Months At A Time." Mashable. N. p., 2018. Web. 1 Mar. 2018.

Becker, Paula. "HistoryLink.org." Dance Marathons of the 1920s and 1930s , 25 Aug. 2003, www.historylink.org/File/5534.

Ciesielski, Amy. "The Dance Marathon Fad Of The 1920S And 1930S - Moving Image Research Collections." Library.sc.edu. N. p., 2018. Web. 22 Feb. 2018.

"Dance Marathon Launches Fundraising App." Dance Marathon. N. p., 2018. Web. 27 Feb. 2018.

Vonow, Brittany. "Harrowing Photos Reveal The Deadly 1920S Dance Marathons Where Contestants Fainted." The Sun. N. p., 2017. Web. 1 Mar. 2018.

Watson, Sonny. "Dance Marathons - Aka Continuos Motion Derbies And Pageants Of Fatique Main1." Streetswing.com. N. p., 2018. Web. 1 Mar. 2018.

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By Sammy Dragos Did you know? After the Great Depression began, dance marathons were soon banned because of the dark and exploitative intentions behind the activity. Did you know?