Daily life in the United States, 1920-1940 How Americans lived through the "Roaring Twenties" and the Great Depression

What were your grandparents doing in the 1920s and '30s? How did they spend their days and how were they affected by the popular culture? What were their work and domestic lives like? These are the questions Kyvig, a Bancroft Prize winner for Explicit and Authentic Acts and Northern Illinois University history professor, explores probingly in his new study. Kyvig covers everything from the development of the small pick-up truck to the spread of country and western music and shifting practices in religion and health care. He delineates how the mass production of cars changed people's buying habits with the introduction of credit, and how battery-powered radios meant rural folks could share the new mass culture with city dwellers. Kyvig also documents the massive impact-most of it negative-of Prohibition, a sign of the federal government's growing impact on people's lives, an impact greatly heightened by the New Deal. In the midst of his quite lucid and readable analysis, the author also touches on race, gender, class and the differences between rural and urban environments. In sum, Kyvig's book represents a penetrating information-packed portrait of Main Street, USA, during tumultuous times. 53 b&w photos. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kyvig (Nearby History) hitches us to the rhythms and interests of Americans' work and play for a ride through two decades of social change and political realignment, a time of sometimes surprising resilience in the habits of family and community. This book is a modest revision of the author's well-received Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1939, with a new year added. Instead of focusing on the middle or upper class and on intellectuals alone, Kyvig emphasizes the diversity of experiences. He relies on census data to gauge economic, social, and geographic mobility and makes much of the technological changes afforded by radio and automobile and the spread of movies, which brought Americans together even as race and class divided them. Especially instructive are his case studies of six places-urban and rural-from across America, which show the tenacity of racial, religious, and regional identities. This work lacks the verve of Frederick Lewis Allen's still useful, if somewhat outdated, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s and Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America, but it stands strong on a bedrock of solid research and clear writing. Highly recommended for any library lacking the original.-Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.