Only Yesterday

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Only Yesterday

Author: Frederick L. Allen
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 1931
Pages: 352
Cover Price: $ 14.99

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Prohibition. Al Capone. The President Harding scandals. The revolution of manners and morals, Black Tuesday. These are only an inkling of the events and figures characterizing the wild, tumultuous era that was the Roaring Twenties. Originally published in 1931, Only Yesterday traces the rise if post-World War I prosperity up to the Wall Street crash of 1929 against the colorful backdrop of flappers, speakeasies, the first radio, and the scandalous rise of skirt hemlines.

Hailed as an instant classic, this is Frederick Lewis Allen's vivid and definitive account of one of the twentieth century's most fascinating decades, chronicling a time of both joy and terror?when dizzying highs were quickly succeeded by heartbreaking lows.

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Background Information

Prohibition was the social experiment in the abolition of the human consumption of intoxicating alcohol between 1919 and 1933. Al Capone came to Chicago and took over the mob, organizing crime during Prohibition and becoming the nation's most notorious gangster. Warren Harding of Ohio promised a return to normalcy, which evidently meant corruption and complacency. The meteoric rise of the stock market during the 1920's came to an abrupt end during October 1929 in a sequence of declines known as the Great Crash. The decade of the 1920's introduced America to new freedoms and ways of thinking.