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A Snapshot of Life in the 1920's

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1920’s U.S. Immigration Policies

It may be questioned if the present basis of selection according to racial types is a more desirable policy than selection within a race according to the merits and defects of individuals. However, to a certain extent our immigration laws take into account individual qualifications, for example by excluding aliens with records of crime or insanity.

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Introduction of 40 Hour Working Week

THAT man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow is a dictum of the Scriptures that has been pretty well abolished in America, where, in the main, he now acquires, not bread, but canned goods and package foods, by the oil on a machine. Mr. Thomas A. Edison is on record as [...]

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War Bread in Peace Time

BELGIUM and France might have been encouraged by the good news from the nutrition chemists at Williamstown about the prospect of food from the air and sun, and also by the black case they made out against white bread. For the Belgian and French people have gone back on the war basis of “black bread” [...]

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Peaches and Daddy – A Roaring Twenties Romance

On the evening of March 5, 1926, fifty-one year old Manhattan millionaire Edward “Daddy” Browning, waltzed through the doors of the legendary Hotel McAlpin, and into the life of a fifteen year old high school girl named Frances “Peaches” Heenan. Thirty-seven days later, with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in [...]

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Wall Street 1929 Part 12

Another and fascinating phenomenon has arisen on the American scene. I refer to the investment trusts. People too timid to risk their own judgment and money in the stock market can now buy brains to invest and speculate for them. At this writing there are more than 450 investment trusts in the market, with a [...]

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Wall Street 1929 Part 11

The desire to make money is not limited to minds trained in making it. The easier money can be made, and the more quickly, the better it attracts the public. Just now the most fabulous money-making machine in the country seems to be the stock market; so the public has enthusiastically gone shopping there.
Savings banks [...]

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Wall Street 1929 Part 10

Since the beginning of 1929, the United Press has thrice revamped its financial news system in quest of greater speed. Two years ago, a single Morse wire, with a capacity of thirty words a minute, provided member newspapers with all the financial news they wanted. Most of them wanted only Curb and bond reports. Local [...]

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Wall Street 1929 Part 9

All this has had a most striking influence upon the country’s press. From the doubtful prestige of being “too technical” for the average reader’s mind, financial news has risen—or fallen—to the persuasive estate of being front page news, when, as and if issued. Ten years ago the financial department of even the greatest newspapers consisted [...]

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