The
1920s was the decade that ran from January 1, 1920, to December 31, 1929. It is sometimes referred to as the
Roaring TwentiesRoaring Twenties is a phrase used to describe the 1920s, principally in North America, that emphasizes the period's social, artistic, and cultural dynamism...
or the
Jazz AgeThe Jazz Age describes a period in American history following the end of World War I, continuing through the Roaring Twenties, and ending with the onset of the Great Depression. It marked a period of changing values alongside a soaring stock market...
, when speaking about the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom. In Europe the decade is sometimes referred to as the "
Golden TwentiesGolden Twenties is a term, mostly used in Europe, to describe the 1920s, in which most of the continent had an economic boom following the First World War and the severe economic downturns that took place between 1919–1923 before the Wall Street Crash in 1929....
".
Since the end of the 20th century, the economic strength during the 1920s has drawn close comparison with the 1950s and 1990s, especially in the United States. These three decades are regarded as periods of economic prosperity, which lasted throughout nearly each entire decade. Each of the three decades followed a tremendous event that occurred in the previous decade (
World War IWorld War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...
and
Spanish fluThe 1918 flu pandemic was an influenza pandemic that spread to nearly every part of the world. It was caused by an unusually virulent and deadly influenza A virus strain of subtype H1N1. Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify the geographic origin of the virus...
in the 1910s,
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
in the 1940s, and the end of the
Cold WarThe Cold War was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, and economic competition existing after World War II , primarily between the USSR and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, including the United States...
in the late 1980s).
However, not all countries enjoyed this prosperity. The
Weimar RepublicThe Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government, named after Weimar, the place where the constitutional assembly took place. Its official name was still Deutsches Reich , however...
, like many other European countries, had to face a severe economic downturn in the opening years of the decade, because of the enormous debt caused by the war as well as the
Treaty of VersaillesThe Treaty of Versailles was one of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The other Central Powers on the German side of...
. Such a crisis would culminate with a devaluation of the Mark in 1923, eventually leading to severe economic problems and, in the long term, favour the rise of the Nazi Party.
Additionally, the decade was characterized by the rise of radical political movements, especially in regions that were once part of empires.
CommunismCommunism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human...
began attracting large numbers of followers following the success of the
October RevolutionTheOctober Revolution , also known as the Soviet Revolution or Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution. It began with an armed insurrection in Petrograd traditionally dated to 25 October 1917 Julian calendar...
and the
BolshevikThe Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903...
s' determination to win the subsequent
Russian Civil WarThe Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed and the Soviets under the domination of the Bolshevik party assumed power, first in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a multi-party war that...
. The Bolsheviks would eventually adopt a policy of
mixed economicsThe New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin to prevent the Russian economy from collapsing...
, from 1921 to 1928, and also give birth to the USSR, at the end of 1922. The twenties marked the first time in America that the population in the cities surpassed the population of rural areas. This was due to rapid urbanization starting in the 1920s.
The 1920s also experienced the rise of the far-right and
fascismFascism, , comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology developed in Italy. Fascists believe that nations and/or races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in...
in Europe and elsewhere, being perceived as a solution to prevent the spread of
CommunismCommunism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human...
. The knotty economic problems also favoured the rise of dictatorships in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, such as Józef Piłsudski in Poland and Peter and
Alexander KarađorđevićAlexander I Karađorđević was the first king of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as well as the last king of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes .-Childhood:Alexander Karađorđević was born in Cetinje in Principality of Montenegro in December 1888...
of Yugoslavia. The Stock Market collapsed during October 1929 (see
Black ThursdayThe Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash or the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout....
) and drew a line under the prosperous 1920s.
Technology
- John Logie Baird
John Logie Baird was a Scottish engineer and inventor of the world's first working television system, also the world's first fully electronic colour television broadcast...
invents the first working mechanical televisionTelevision is a widely used telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images, either monochromatic or color, usually accompanied by sound. "Television" may also refer specifically to a television set, television programming or television transmission...
system (1925). In 1928 he invents and demonstrates the first color television.
- Warner Brothers produces the first movie with a soundtrack Don Juan
Don Juan is a Warner Brothers film, directed by Alan Crosland. It was the first feature-length film with synchronized Vitaphone sound effects and musical soundtrack, though it has no spoken dialogue...
in 1926, followed by the first Part-Talkie The Jazz SingerThe Jazz Singer is a American musical film. The first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences, its release heralded the commercial ascendance of the "talkies" and the decline of the silent film era. Produced by Warner Bros. with its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, the...
in 1927, the first All-Talking movie Lights of New York in 1928 and the first All-Color All-Talking movie On with the Show 1929.
- Charles Lindbergh
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was an American aviator, author, inventor and explorer.On May 20–21, 1927, Lindbergh, then a 25-year old U.S...
becomes the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean (May 20–21, 1927), non-stop from New YorkLong Island is an island located in southeastern New York, United States, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City, and two of which are mainly suburban...
to Paris, France.
- Karl Ferdinand Braun
Karl Ferdinand Braun was a German inventor, physicist and Nobel laureate in physics . Braun contributed significantly to the development of the radio and TV technology: won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909.-Biography:...
invented the modern electronic cathode ray tubeThe cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen, with internal or external means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam, used to create images in the form of light emitted from the fluorescent screen...
in 1897. The CRT became a commercial product in 1922.
- Record companies (such as Victor, Brunswick and Columbia) introduce an electrical recording process on their phonograph records in 1925 (that had been developed by Western Electric
Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering company, the manufacturing arm of AT&T from 1881 to 1995. It was the scene of a number of technological innovations and also some seminal developments in industrial management...
), resulting in a more lifelike sound.
- Robert Goddard makes the first flight of a liquid-fueled rocket in 1926.
International issues
- See also Social issues of the 1920s
The 1920s was the rise of a variety of social issues amidst a rapidly changing world. Conflicts arose concerning what was considered acceptable and respectable and what ought to be proscribed or made illegal...
- Rise of radical political movements amid the economic and political turmoil after World War I
World War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...
and after the stock market crash such as communismCommunism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human...
and fascismFascism, , comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology developed in Italy. Fascists believe that nations and/or races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in...
.
- Kellogg-Briand Pact
The Kellogg-Briand Pact was a multinational treaty that prohibited the use of war as "an instrument of national policy."...
to end war.
- Women are given the right to vote in multiple countries in the 1920s.
- Stock market crash of 1929 devastates economies across the world and marks the beginning of the Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
.
Africa
- Pan-Africanist
Pan-Africanism is a sociopolitical world view, philosophy, and movement which seeks to unify native Africans and members of the African diaspora into a "global African community"...
supporters of Marcus GarveyMarcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH , was a publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, Black Nationalist, Pan-Africanist, and orator...
's Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities LeagueThe Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League is an international self-help organization founded by Marcus Garvey. It was originally chartered under the name "Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League" in Jamaica on...
(UNIA-ACL) are repressed by colonial powers in Africa. Garvey's UNIA-ACL supported the creation of a state led by black people in Africa including African-Americans.
- Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Western Asia...
officially becomes an independent country in 1922, through it still remains under military and political influence of the British Empire.
United States of America
- Prohibition of alcohol occurs in the United States. Prohibition in the United States
In the history of the United States, Prohibition, also known as The Noble Experiment, is the period from 1919 to 1933, during which the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol for consumption were banned nationally as mandated in the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States...
began January 16, 1919, with the ratification of the Eighteenth AmendmentAmendment XVIII of the United States Constitution, along with the Volstead Act , established Prohibition in the United States. Its ratification was certified on January 16, 1919...
to the U.S.ConstitutionThe Constitution of the United States of America is the supreme law of the United States. It is the foundation and source of the legal authority underlying the existence of the United States of America and the federal government of the United States...
, and it continued throughout the 1920s. Prohibition was finally repealed in 1933. Organized crime related to the illegal sale of alcohol booms, such as by Chicago mob leader Al CaponeAlphonse Gabriel "Al" Capone was an American gangster who led a crime syndicate dedicated to smuggling and bootlegging of liquor and other illegal activities during the Prohibition Era of the 1920s and 1930s....
.
- Restrictions on immigration took effect in 1924. National quotas curbed most Eastern and Southern European nationalities, further enforced the ban on Asians and Africans, and put mild regulations on nationalities from the Western Hemisphere (Latin Americans).
- The major sport was baseball and the most famous player was Babe Ruth
George Herman Ruth, Jr. , also popularly known as "Babe" Ruth, "The Bambino", and "The Sultan of Swat", was an American Major League baseball player from –...
.
- The Lost Generation
The "Lost Generation" is a term coined by author and poet Gertrude Stein to characterize a general motif of disillusionment of American literary notables who lived in Paris and Europe after the First World War. Figures identified with the "Lost Generation" included authors and artists such as...
(which characterized disillusionment), was the name Gertrude SteinGertrude Stein was an American writer who spent most of her life in France, and who became a catalyst in the development of modern art and literature. Her life was marked by two primary relationships, the first with her brother Leo Stein, from 1874-1914 , and the second with Alice B...
gave to American writers, poets, and artists living in Europe during the 1920s. Famous members of the Lost GenerationThe "Lost Generation" is a term coined by author and poet Gertrude Stein to characterize a general motif of disillusionment of American literary notables who lived in Paris and Europe after the First World War. Figures identified with the "Lost Generation" included authors and artists such as...
include Cole PorterCole Albert Porter was an American composer and songwriter. His works include the musical comedies Kiss Me, Kate, Fifty Million Frenchmen, DuBarry Was a Lady and Anything Goes, as well as songs like "Night and Day", "I Get a Kick out of You", "Well, Did You Evah!" and "I've Got You Under My Skin"...
, Gerald Murphy, Patrick Henry BrucePatrick Henry Bruce was an American cubist painter.-Biography:A descendant of Patrick Henry, Bruce was born in Campbell County, Virginia, the second of four children. His family had once owned a huge plantation, Berry Hill, worked by over 3,000 slaves...
, Waldo PeirceWaldo Peirce was an American painter, born in Bangor, Maine.For many years, until his death, Peirce was both a prominent painter and a well-known character...
, Ernest HemingwayErnest Miller Hemingway was an American writer and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World War I later known as "the Lost Generation." He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature...
, F. Scott FitzgeraldFrancis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the Twenties...
, Zelda FitzgeraldZelda Sayre Fitzgerald , born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama, was a novelist and the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was an icon of the 1920s—dubbed by her husband "the first American Flapper". After the success of his first novel This Side of Paradise , the Fitzgeralds became celebrities...
, Ezra PoundEzra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual who was a major figure of the Modernist movement in the first half of the 20th century. He is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry...
, John Dos PassosJohn Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist.-Early life:Dos Passos was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of John Randolph Dos Passos Jr. . The elder Dos Passos was a lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, the son of John Randolph Dos Passos and Mary Hays and the brother of Louis...
, Sherwood AndersonSherwood Anderson was an American writer, mainly of short stories, most notably the collection Winesburg, Ohio...
, and John SteinbeckJohn Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and the novella Of Mice and Men . He wrote a total of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and five collections of short stories...
.
Asia
- Turkish War of Independence
The Turkish War of Independence is the political and military resistance developed by Turkish Nationalists to the Allied partitioning of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in World War I...
(1920–23).
- The Qajar dynasty
The Qajar dynasty ) was a Turco-Persian Qajar royal family who ruled Persia from 1794 to 1925....
ended under Ahmad Shah QajarAhmad Shah Qajar was Shah of Iran from July 16, 1909, to October 31, 1925 and the last of the Qajar dynasty.-Reign:...
and Reza Shah Pahlavi formed the Pahlavi DynastyThe Pahlavi dynasty ruled Iran from the crowning of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925, following the overthrow of Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last ruler of the Qajar dynasty, already weakened by Soviet and British occupation....
, which would later become the last monarchy of IranIran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran is a country in Western Asia. The name Iran has been in use natively since the Sassanid period and came into international use from 1935, before which the country was known internationally as Persia...
.
- The Chinese Civil War
The Chinese Civil War was fought between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China . The war began in April 1927, amidst the Northern Expedition,. The war represented an ideological split between the Western-supported Nationalist KMT and the Soviet-supported Communist CPC...
begins (1926–37).
Europe
- Polish-Soviet war
The Polish–Soviet War was an armed conflict between Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine against the Second Polish Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic, four states in post-World War I Europe. The war was the result of the belligerents' desire to expand their territories and their influence...
(1920–21).
- Major armed conflict in Ireland
Ireland is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island in the world. It lies to the north-west of continental Europe and is surrounded by hundreds of islands and islets. To the east of Ireland, separated by the Irish Sea, is the island of Great Britain...
including Irish War of IndependenceThe Irish War of Independence was a guerrilla war mounted against the British government in Ireland by the Irish Republican Army . It began in January 1919, following the Irish Republic's declaration of independence, and ended with a truce in July 1921...
(1919–1921) resulting in Ireland becoming an independent country in 1922 followed by the Irish Civil WarThe Irish Civil War was a conflict that accompanied the establishment of the Irish Free State as an entity independent from the United Kingdom within the British Empire....
(1922–23).
- The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
(a.k.a. the Soviet Union) is created in 1922.
- Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini,
KSMOM GCTE was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism. He became the Prime Minister of Italy in 1922 and began using the title Il Duce by...
of the National Fascist PartyThe National Fascist Party was an Italian party, created by Benito Mussolini as the political expression of fascism...
became Italy's Prime Minister, shortly thereafter creating the world's first fascistFascism, , comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology developed in Italy. Fascists believe that nations and/or races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in...
government. The Fascist regime establishes a totalitarian state led by Mussolini as a dictator. The Fascist regime restores good relations between the Roman Catholic ChurchThe Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church. With more than a billion members, over half of all Christians and more than one-sixth of the world's population, the Catholic Church is a communion of the Western, or Latin Rite Church, and...
and Italy with the Lateran Pact which creates Vatican CityVatican City , officially the State of the Vatican City , is a landlocked sovereign city-state whose territory consists of a walled enclave within the city of Rome, the capital city of Italy...
. The Fascist regime pursues an expansionist agenda in Europe such as by raiding the Greek island of CorfuCorfu is a Greek island in the Ionian Sea. It is the second largest of the Ionian Islands, and its northern part lies off the coast of Sarandë, Albania from which it is separated by straits varying in breadth from 3 to 23 km , including one near ancient Butrint, while its southern part lies...
in 1923, pressuring AlbaniaAlbania , officially the Republic of Albania , is a Mediterranean country in South Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Montenegro to the north, Kosovo to the northeast, Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south-east...
to submit to becoming a de facto Italian protectorate in the mid-1920s, and threatening YugoslaviaYugoslavia is a term that describes three political entities that existed successively on the Balkan Peninsula in Europe, during most of the 20th century.The first country to be known by this...
with war until the Yugoslav government agrees to allow Italians to freely immigrate into DalmatiaDalmatia , is a region on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea and is situated in modern Croatia. It spreads between the island of Rab in the northwest and the Bay of Kotor, in Montenegro, in the southeast...
(a region of Yugoslavia claimed by Italian nationalists) with the Treaty of NettunoThe Treaty of Nettuno was an agreement made between the governments of the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1928 which permitted Italians to freely immigrate into Yugoslavia's coastal region of Dalmatia . The treaty was made to solve a long-standing territorial dispute between...
.
- Germany suffers from economic crisis in the early 1920s and hyperinflation of currency in 1923. French military forces briefly occupy the industrial Ruhr
The Ruhr is a medium-size river in western Germany , a right tributary of the Rhine.-Description:The source of the Ruhr is at an elevation of approximately 2,200 feet , near the town of Winterberg in the mountainous Sauerland region, and it flows into the lower Rhine river at an elevation of only...
region in Germany from 1923 to 1924 after Germany failed to be able to pay its reparations payments. The recently formed fringe National Socialist German Workers' Party (a.k.a. Nazi Party) led by Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , popularly known as the Nazi Party...
attempts a coup against the Bavarian and German governments in the Beer Hall PutschThe Beer Hall Putsch was a failed attempt at revolution that occurred between the evening of 8 November and the early afternoon of 9 November 1923, when Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff, and other heads of the...
which fails, resulting in Hitler being briefly imprisoned for one year in prison where he writes Mein KampfMein Kampf, in English: My Struggle, is a book by Adolf Hitler. It combines elements of autobiography with an exposition of Hitler's political ideology...
.
Economics
- The New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin to prevent the Russian economy from collapsing...
is created by the Bolsheviks in RussiaRussia , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia . It is a semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
.
- The Dawes Plan
The Dawes Plan was an attempt following World War I for the Allies to collect war reparations debt from Germany...
, which lasted from 1924 to 1928.
- Economic boom ended by "Black Tuesday
Black Tuesday is a term used to refer to certain events which occur on a Tuesday. It has been used in the following cases:*Wall Street Crash of 1929, an American stock market crash...
" (October 29, 1929); the stock market crashA stock market crash is a sudden dramatic decline of stock prices across a significant cross-section of a stock market. Crashes are driven by panic as much as by underlying economic factors...
es, leading to the Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
.
Literature and Arts
- Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. Commonly known simply as Picasso, he is one of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art...
paints Three MusiciansThree Musicians is the title of two similar collage and oil paintings by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. They were both completed in 1921 in Fontainebleau near Paris, France, and exemplify the Synthetic Cubist style...
- Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
completes The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even most often called The Large Glass, is an artwork by Marcel Duchamp....
- André Breton
André Breton was a French writer, poet, and surrealist theorist, and is best known as the principal founder of Surrealism...
publishes the Surrealist ManifestoTwo Surrealist Manifestos were issued by the Surrealist movement, in 1924 and 1929, respectively. The first was written by André Breton, the second was supervised by him. Breton drafted a third Surrealist Manifesto, which was never issued.-First manifesto:...
- D.H. Lawrence publishes Women in Love
Women in Love is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence published in 1920. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow , and follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an...
, and Lady Chatterley's LoverLady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence written in 1928.Printed in Florence, Italy, in 1928, it was not printed in the United Kingdom until 1960...
- Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, epistler, publisher, feminist, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
publishes Jacob's RoomJacob's Room is the third novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 26 October 1922.The novel centres, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders, and is presented entirely by the impressions other characters have of Jacob [except for those times when we do...
, Mrs. Dalloway, To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse is a novel by Virginia Woolf. A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centering on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skillfully manipulates temporality and psychological exploration.To the Lighthouse follows and...
, A Room of One's OwnA Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published during 24 October 1929, it was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928...
and Orlando
- George Gershwin
George Gershwin was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are universally familiar....
writes Rhapsody in BlueRhapsody in Blue is a musical composition by George Gershwin for solo piano and jazz band written in 1924, which combines elements of classical music with jazz-influenced effects. The composition was orchestrated by Ferde Grofé three times, in 1924, in 1926, and finally in 1946...
- T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM , was a poet, playwright, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are The Love Song of J...
publishes The Waste LandThe Waste Land[A] is a 434 line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922...
- James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish expatriate author, playwright and poet of the 20th century. He is known for his landmark novel Ulysses and its controversial successor Finnegans Wake , as well as the short story collection Dubliners and the semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of...
publishes UlyssesUlysses is a novel by James Joyce, first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922, in Paris...
- Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a major fiction writer of the 20th century. He was born to a middle-class German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Bohemia , Austria–Hungary...
publishes The TrialThe Trial is a novel by Franz Kafka, first published in 1925. One of Kafka's best-known works, it tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime never revealed either to him or the reader.Like Kafka's other novels, The Trial was...
- Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque was a German author, most famous today for his anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front.-Life:...
publishes All Quiet on the Western FrontAll Quiet on the Western Front is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental duress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front.The...
- Rene Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte
[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...
paints The Treachery of ImagesThe Treachery of Images is a series of paintings by René Magritte, the most noted of which is famous for its inscription Ceci n'est pas une pipe , French for this is not a pipe...
- Hugh MacDiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid is the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve , a significant Scottish poet of the 20th century. He was instrumental in creating a Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century. Unusually for a first generation modernist, he...
publishes A Drunk Man Looks at the ThistleA Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is a long poem by Hugh MacDiarmid written in Scots and published in 1926. It is composed as a form of monologue with influences from stream of consciousness genres of writing...
- Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School who, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture....
builds the Bauhaus' is the common term for the ', a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933....
in DessauDessau is a town in Germany on the junction of the rivers Mulde and Elbe, in the Bundesland of Saxony-Anhalt. Since 1 July 2007, it is part of the merged town Dessau-Roßlau. Population of Dessau proper: 77,973 .-Geography:...
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the Twenties...
publishes This Side of ParadiseThis Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, and taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth...
, The Beautiful and DamnedThe Beautiful and Damned, first published by Scribner's in 1922, is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel.It tells the story of Anthony Patch , the relationship with his wife Gloria, his service in the army, and alcoholism...
and The Great GatsbyThe Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published on April 10, 1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City during the summer of 1922 and is a critique of the American Dream....
- Hermann Hesse
Hermann Hesse was a German Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. In 1946 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature...
publishes SiddharthaSiddhartha is an allegorical novel by Hermann Hesse which deals with the spiritual journey of a boy known as Siddhartha from the Indian Subcontinent during the time of the Buddha....
- Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American writer and journalist. He was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, and one of the veterans of World War I later known as "the Lost Generation." He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in Literature...
publishes The Sun Also RisesThe Sun Also Rises is the first major novel by Ernest Hemingway. Published in 1926, the plot centers on a group of expatriate Americans in Europe during the 1920s...
and A Farewell to ArmsA Farewell to Arms is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Ernest Hemingway, first published in 1929. The novel is told through the point of view of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American serving as an ambulance driver in the Italian army during World War I...
- Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. His best known work is his play Our Town.-Early years:...
publishes The Bridge of San Luis ReyThe Bridge of San Luis Rey is American author Thornton Wilder's second novel, first published in 1927 to worldwide acclaim. It tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse of an Inca rope-fiber suspension bridge in Peru, and the events that lead up to their being on the...
- Alexey Tolstoy publishes Aelita
Aelita also known as Aelita or The Decline of Mars is a 1923 science fiction novel by Russian author Alexei Tolstoy.-Plot summary:...
- Kahlil Gibran publishes the The Prophet
The Prophet is a book of 26 poetic essays written in Arabic in 1923 by the Lebanese–American artist, philosopher and writer Khalil Gibran. In the book, the prophet Al-mustafa who has lived in the foreign city of Orphalese for 12 years is about to board a ship which will carry him home...
- George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays...
publishes Back to MethuselahBack to Methuselah , by George Bernard Shaw consists of a preface and a series of five plays: In the Beginning: B.C. 4004 , The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas: Present Day, The Thing Happens: A.D. 2170, Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman: A.D. 3000, and As Far as Thought Can Reach: A.D...
- Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright, and Nobel laureate in Literature. His plays are among the first to introduce into American drama the techniques of realism, associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August...
awarded Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond the HorizonBeyond the Horizon is a 1920 play written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. It was O'Neill's first full-length work, and the winner of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama....
in 1920, Anna ChristieAnna Christie is a play in four acts by Eugene O'Neill. It made its Broadway debut at the Vanderbilt Theatre on November 2, 1921. O'Neill received the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his work.-Plot summary:...
in 1922, and Strange InterludeStrange Interlude is an experimental play by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill finished the play in 1923, but it was not produced on Broadway until 1928, when it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Lynn Fontanne originated the central role of Nina Leeds on Broadway...
in 1928.
- Sinclair Lewis
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." His works...
publishes Main StreetMain Street is the metonym for a generic street name of the primary retail street of a village, town, or small city in many parts of the world...
, BabbittBabbitt, first published in 1922, is a novel by Sinclair Lewis. Largely a satire of American culture, society, and behavior, its main theme focuses on the power of conformity, and the vacuity of middle-class American life....
, DodsworthDodsworth is a satirical novel by American writer Sinclair Lewis first published by Harcourt Brace & Company in 1929. Its subject, the differences between US and European intellect, manners, and morals, is one that frequently appears in the works of Henry James.-Plot summary:Samuel Dodsworth is an...
, ArrowsmithArrowsmith is a novel by American author and playwright Sinclair Lewis that was published in 1925. It won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Lewis but he refused to accept it. Lewis was greatly assisted in its preparation by science writer Dr. Paul de Kruif, who received 25% of the royalties on sales,...
, and Elmer GantryElmer Gantry is a satirical novel written by Sinclair Lewis in 1926 and published by Harcourt in March 1927.-Background:Lewis did research for the novel by observing the work of various preachers in Kansas City in his so-called "Sunday School" meetings on Wednesdays. He first worked with William L...
- Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for an insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar," "Disillusionment of...
publishes his first book of poetry, HarmoniumA harmonium is a free-standing keyboard instrument similar to a reed organ. Sound is produced by air, supplied by foot-operated or hand-operated bellows, being blown through sets of free reeds, resulting in a sound similar to that of an accordion....
Culture and religion
- Prohibition
Prohibition of alcohol, often referred to simply as prohibition, is a sumptuary law which prohibits alcohol. Typically, the manufacture, transportation, import, export, and sale of alcoholic beverages is restricted or illegal. The term can also apply to the periods in the histories of the countries...
— legal attempt to end consumption of alcoholAn alcoholic beverage is a drink that contains ethanol . Alcoholic beverages are divided into three general classes: beers, wines, and spirits....
in Canada, the USA, Norway and Finland
- Youth culture of The Lost Generation
The "Lost Generation" is a term coined by author and poet Gertrude Stein to characterize a general motif of disillusionment of American literary notables who lived in Paris and Europe after the First World War. Figures identified with the "Lost Generation" included authors and artists such as...
; flapperThe term flapper in the 1920s referred to a "new breed" of young women who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to the new jazz music, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior...
s, the CharlestonThe Charleston is a dance named for the city of Charleston, South Carolina. The rhythm was popularized in mainstream dance music in the United States by a 1923 tune called The Charleston by composer/pianist James P. Johnson which originated in the Broadway show Runnin' Wild and became one of the...
, and bobbed hair.
- "The Jazz Age" — jazz
Jazz is a musical art form which originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions....
and jazz-influenced dance music widely popular
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the Twenties...
publishes some of the most enduring novels characterizing the Jazz Age. This Side of ParadiseThis Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, and taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth...
, The Beautiful and DamnedThe Beautiful and Damned, first published by Scribner's in 1922, is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel.It tells the story of Anthony Patch , the relationship with his wife Gloria, his service in the army, and alcoholism...
, and The Great GatsbyThe Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published on April 10, 1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City during the summer of 1922 and is a critique of the American Dream....
, as well as three short story collections, were all published in these years.
- Women's suffrage
Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote, and historically includes the economic and political reform movement aimed at extending suffrage to women. The movement's modern origins lie in France in the 18th century. Of currently existing independent countries, New Zealand was the first to give...
movement continues to make gains as women obtain full voting rights in Finland in 1906, New Zealand in 1909, Denmark in 1915, in the USA in 1920, and in the UK in 1918 (women over 30) and in 1928 (full enfranchisement); and women begin to enter the workplace in larger numbers.
- In the US, gangsters and the rise of organized crime
Organized crime or criminal organizations can be defined as a transnational grouping of highly centralized enterprises run by criminals for the purpose of engaging in illegal activity, most commonly for the purpose of generating a monetary profit...
, often associated with bootleg liquor, in defiance of Prohibition.
- Rum rows are established to import bootleg alcoholic beverages into U.S.
- Growth and general acceptance of the Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan , informally known as The Klan, is the name of several past and present hate group organizations in the United States whose avowed purpose was to protect the rights of and further the interests of white Americans by violence and intimidation. The first such organizations originated in...
in America.
- First commercial radio
Radio is the transmission of signals by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
station in the U.S. (KDKA 1020 AMKDKA is a radio station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that was the first commercially licensed radio station in the United States, a distinction that has also been challenged by other stations....
) goes on air in PittsburghPittsburgh is a city in and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, and the second largest city in the state. Its population was 334,563 at the 2000 census; by 2006, it was estimated to have fallen to 312,819. The population of the seven-county metropolitan area is...
in 1920; radio quickly becomes a popular entertainment medium.
- Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals
The Methodist Episcopal Church Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals was a major organization in the American temperance movement which led to the introduction of prohibition in 1920...
defends alcohol prohibition in U.S.
- First feature-length motion picture with a soundtrack
A soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the synchronized...
(Don JuanDon Juan is a Warner Brothers film, directed by Alan Crosland. It was the first feature-length film with synchronized Vitaphone sound effects and musical soundtrack, though it has no spoken dialogue...
) is released in 1926. First part-talkie (The Jazz SingerThe Jazz Singer is a American musical film. The first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences, its release heralded the commercial ascendance of the "talkies" and the decline of the silent film era. Produced by Warner Bros. with its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, the...
) released in 1927, first all-talking feature (Lights of New York) released in 1928 and first all-color all-talking feature (On with the Show) released in 1929.
- Beginning of surrealist movement.
- Beginning of the Art Deco
Art Deco was a popular international art design movement from 1925 until the 1940s, affecting the decorative arts such as architecture, interior design, and industrial design, as well as the visual arts such as fashion, painting, the graphic arts, and film...
movement.
- Fads such as marathon dancing
Marathon dancing is a dance activity that became a popular fad in the 1920s and 1930s. Many unemployed people competed in the contests in order to achieve fame or win monetary prizes...
, mah-jongg, YahtzeeYahtzee is a dice game made by Milton Bradley . The object of the game is to score the most points by rolling five dice to make certain combinations. The dice can be rolled up to three times in a turn to try to make one of the thirteen possible scoring combinations...
, crossword puzzleFor the common puzzle, see CrosswordCrossword Puzzle was the second to last album made by The Partridge Family and was not one of the most popular albums. It was released in 1973 and did not produce a U.S. single. This album was finally released on CD in 2003 on Arista's BMG Heritage label...
s and pole-sittingPole-sitting is the practice of sitting on a pole for extended lengths of time, generally used as a test of endurance. A small platform may be placed at the top of the pole.- History :...
are popular.
- The height of the clip joint
A clip joint or fleshpot is an establishment, usually a strip club or entertainment bar, typically one claiming to offer adult entertainment or bottle service, in which customers are tricked into paying money and receive poor goods or services, or none, in return...
.
- The Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance refers to the flowering of African American cultural and intellectual life during the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology The New Negro edited by Alain Locke...
centered in a thriving African-American community of HarlemHarlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, long known as a major African-American residential, cultural, and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands.Harlem has been defined by a series...
, New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
.
- The Scopes Trial
The Scopes Trial was an American legal case that tested the Butler Act, which made it unlawful, in any state-funded educational establishment in Tennessee, "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and...
(1925) which declared that John T. Scopes had violated the law by teaching evolutionIn biology, evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though changes produced in any one generation are normally small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the population, a...
in schools, creating tension between the competing theories of creationismCreationism refers to the religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe were created in some form by a supernatural being or beings, commonly a single deity...
and evolutionIn biology, evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though changes produced in any one generation are normally small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the population, a...
.
- Bishop James Cannon, Jr. becomes a U.S. temperance movement
A temperance movement is a social movement against the use of Alcoholic beverages. Temperance movements may criticize excessive alcohol use, promote complete abstinence, or pressure the government to enact anti-alcohol legislation....
leader.
- The Group of Seven (artists)
The Group of Seven were a group of Canadian landscape painters in the 1920s, originally consisting of Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley. Tom Thomson and Emily Carr were also closely associated with the Group...
.
- Repeal organizations
As increasing numbers of people became disillusioned with the negative effects of national prohibition in the United States, a variety of repeal organizations emerged...
organized to fight national prohibition in U.S.
- Minister Daisey Douglas Barr
Daisy Douglas Barr was Imperial Empress of the Indiana Women's Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s and an active member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union . Professionally, she was a Quaker minister in two prominent churches....
heads Women's Ku Klux Klan (WKKKThe WKKK was one of a number of auxiliaries of the Ku Klux Klan. While most women focused on the moral, civic, and educational agenda of the Klan, they also had considerable involvement in issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and religion...
).
- The tomb of Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun , Egyptian was an Egyptian Pharaoh of the Eighteenth dynasty , during the period of Egyptian history known as the New Kingdom...
is discovered intact by Howard CarterHoward Carter was an English archaeologist and Egyptologist, noted as a primary discoverer of the tomb of Tutankhamun....
(1922). This begins a second revival of EgyptomaniaEgyptomania is a concept that describes the Western fascination with ancient Egyptian culture and history. Although this fascination goes back to a time immediately following the pharaonic period, "Egyptomania" specifically refers to the renewed interest in Egypt during the nineteenth century as a...
.
- Edward Higgins becomes the third General ( international leader) of The Salvation Army. His term is from 1929 to 1934.
- The Wall Street Crash of 1929
The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash or the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout....
or Black TuesdayBlack Tuesday is a term used to refer to certain events which occur on a Tuesday. It has been used in the following cases:*Wall Street Crash of 1929, an American stock market crash...
was the catastrophic crash of the Stock MarketA stock market is a public market for the trading of company stock and derivatives at an agreed price; these are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately....
in 1929. The market actually began to drop on Thursday October 24, 1929 and the fall continued until the huge crash on Tuesday October 29, 1929.
- The Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, USA, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the...
opens in Manhattan, November 7, 1929, nine days after the Wall Street Crash.
- Since the 1920s scholars have methodically dug into the layers of history that lie buried at thousands of sites across China
China is a cultural region, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
.
World leaders
- Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) (Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey
, is a Eurasian country that stretches across the Anatolian peninsula in Western Asia and Thrace in the Balkan region of southeastern Europe...
)
- President Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States. A leading intellectual of the Progressive Era, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...
(United States)
- President Warren G. Harding
Warren Gamaliel Harding was the 29th President of the United States, serving from 1921 until his death from a heart attack or stroke in 1923. A Republican from Ohio, Harding was an influential newspaper publisher. He served in the Ohio Senate and later as Lieutenant Governor of Ohio and as a U.S...
(United States)
- President Calvin Coolidge
John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. was the 30th President of the United States . A Republican lawyer from Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of that state. His actions during the Boston Police Strike of 1919 thrust him into the...
(United States)
- President Herbert Hoover
Herbert Clark Hoover was the 31st President of the United States . Hoover was a professional mining engineer and author. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted government intervention under the rubric "economic...
(United States)
- President Alexandre Millerand
Alexandre Millerand was a French socialist politician. He was President of France from 23 September 1920 to 11 June 1924 and Prime Minister of France 20 January to 23 September 1920...
(France)
- President Gaston Doumergue
Pierre-Paul-Henri-Gaston Doumergue was a French politician of the Third Republic....
(France)
- Prime Minister James Scullin
James Henry Scullin , Australian Labor politician and ninth Prime Minister of Australia. Two days after he was sworn in as Prime Minister, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 occurred, marking the beginning of the Great Depression and subsequent Great Depression in Australia.-Early life:Scullin was born...
(Australia)
- Prime Minister Stanley Bruce
Stanley Melbourne Bruce, 1st Viscount Bruce of Melbourne, CH, MC, FRS, PC was an Australian politician and diplomat, and the eighth Prime Minister of Australia. He was the second Australian granted an hereditary peerage of the United Kingdom, but the first whose peerage was formally created...
(Australia)
- Prime Minister William Hughes
William Hughes may refer to:*William Hughes , writer on law and angling*William Hughes , U.S. senator from New Jersey*William Hughes, Baron Hughes , Scottish Labour party politician...
(Australia)
- Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King
William Lyon Mackenzie King, PC, OM, CMG was a Canadian lawyer, economist, university professor, civil servant, journalist, fisherman, waiter, teacher and politician. He served as the tenth Prime Minister of Canada from December 29, 1921, to June 28, 1926; September 25, 1926, to August 6, 1930;...
(Canada)
- Prime Minister Arthur Meighen
Arthur Meighen , PC, QC was the ninth Prime Minister of Canada from July 10, 1920 to December 29, 1921 and June 29 to September 25, 1926. He was the first Prime Minister born after Confederation, and the only one to represent a riding in Manitoba...
(Canada)
- King George V
George VI was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions from 11 December 1936 until his death...
(United Kingdom)
- Prime Minister David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor OM, PC was a British statesman and the only Welsh Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; he is also the only one to have spoken English as a second language, Welsh having been his first.During a long tenure of office, mainly as Chancellor of the...
(United Kingdom)
- Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law
Andrew Bonar Law PC , commonly known as Bonar Law, was a British Conservative Party statesman and Prime Minister. Born in the crown colony of New Brunswick, he is the only British Prime Minister to have been born outside the British Isles. He was also the shortest-serving Prime Minister of the 20th...
(United Kingdom)
- Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, KG, PC was a British Conservative politician, statesman, and major figure on the political scene in the interwar years...
(United Kingdom)
- Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald
James Ramsay MacDonald was a British politician and twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He rose from humble origins to become the first Labour Prime Minister in 1924....
(United Kingdom)
- President Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese revolutionary and political leader. As the foremost pioneer of Republican China, Sun is frequently referred to as the Father of the Nation. Sun played an instrumental role in overthrowing the Qing Dynasty in October 1911, the last imperial dynasty of China...
(Republic of ChinaThe Republic of China , commonly known as Taiwan, is a state in East Asia that has evolved from a single-party state with full global recognition and jurisdiction over China into a democratic state with limited international recognition and jurisdiction only over Taiwan and minor islands, though it...
)
- President Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He was an influential member of the Kuomintang and Sun Yat-sen's close ally. He became the commandant of Kuomintang's Whampoa Military Academy and took Sun's place in the party when the latter died in 1925...
(Republic of China)
- President Friedrich Ebert
Friedrich Ebert was a German politician , who served as Chancellor of Germany and its first president during the Weimar period.-Background:...
(Germany)
- President Paul von Hindenburg
Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg , known universally as Paul von Hindenburg was a German field marshal and statesman....
(Germany)
- President Eamon De Valera
Éamon de Valera was one of the dominant political figures in 20th century Ireland...
(Ireland)
- Ahmad Shah Qajar
Ahmad Shah Qajar was Shah of Iran from July 16, 1909, to October 31, 1925 and the last of the Qajar dynasty.-Reign:...
of Qajar dynastyThe Qajar dynasty ) was a Turco-Persian Qajar royal family who ruled Persia from 1794 to 1925....
(Persia/IranIran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran is a country in Western Asia. The name Iran has been in use natively since the Sassanid period and came into international use from 1935, before which the country was known internationally as Persia...
)
- Reza Shah Pahlavi of Pahlavi Dynasty
The Pahlavi dynasty ruled Iran from the crowning of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925, following the overthrow of Ahmad Shah Qajar, the last ruler of the Qajar dynasty, already weakened by Soviet and British occupation....
(Iran)
- King Victor Emmanuel III
Vittorio Emanuele III was a member of the House of Savoy and King of Italy . In addition, he claimed the crowns of Ethiopia and Albania and claimed the titles Emperor of Ethiopia and King of Albania which were recognised by the great powers in 1937 and 1939...
(Italy)
- Prime Minister Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini,
KSMOM GCTE was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism. He became the Prime Minister of Italy in 1922 and began using the title Il Duce by...
(Italy)
- President W. T. Cosgrave (Irish Free State
The Irish Free State was the state established as a Dominion on 6 December 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed by the British government and Irish representatives exactly twelve months beforehand....
)
- Regent Miklós Horthy
Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya was the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary during the interwar years and throughout most of World War II, serving from 1 March 1920 to 15 October 1944...
(Hungary)
- Emperor Hirohito
, also known as , was the 124th Emperor of Japan according to the traditional order, reigning from December 25, 1926 until his death in 1989....
(Japan)
- Pope Pius XI
Pope Pius XI , born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti, was Pope from 6 February 1922, and sovereign of Vatican City from its creation as an independent state on 11 February 1929 until his death on 10 February 1939...
- Józef Piłsudski (Poland)
- Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin , born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov , was the Bolshevik Leader of the 1917 October Revolution, and the first Head of State of the Soviet Union; in the course of his political career, he used the pseudonyms Lenin, V. I. Lenin, Nikolai Lenin, and N. Lenin...
(Russia, later Soviet Union)
- Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953...
(Soviet Union)
- King Alfonso XIII (Spain)
Entertainers
- Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle
- Louis Armstrong
Louis Daniel Armstrong , nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana....
- Mary Astor
Mary Astor was an American actress. Most remembered for her role as Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart, Astor began her long motion picture career as a teenager in the silent movies of the early 1920s.She eventually made a successful transition to talkies, but almost...
- Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker was an American expatriate entertainer and actress. She became a French citizen in 1937. Most noted as a singer, Baker also was a celebrated dancer in her early career. She was given the nicknames the "Bronze Venus" or the "Black Pearl", as well as the "Créole Goddess" in...
- John Barrymore
John Sidney Blyth Barrymore was an American actor, frequently called the greatest of his generation. He first gained fame as a stage actor, lauded for his portrayals of Hamlet and Richard III...
- Lionel Barrymore
Lionel Barrymore was an American actor of stage, radio and film. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in A Free Soul .-Early life:...
- Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin was an American composer and lyricist widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in history.His first hit song, "Alexander's Ragtime Band", became world famous...
- Clara Bow
Clara Gordon Bow was an American actress who rose to stardom in the silent film era of the 1920s. Her acting artistry and high spirits made her the premier flapper and the film It made her world famous...
- Louise Brooks
Mary Louise Brooks , generally known by her stage name Louise Brooks, was an American dancer, model, showgirl and silent film actress, famous for pioneering the bobbed haircut. Brooks is best known for her three feature roles including two G. W...
- Eddie Cantor
Eddie Cantor was an American comedian, dancer, singer, actor, and songwriter. Familiar to Broadway, radio and early television audiences, this "Apostle of Pep" was regarded almost as a family member by millions because his top-rated radio shows revealed intimate stories and amusing anecdotes about...
- Lon Chaney
Lon Chaney , nicknamed "The Man of a Thousand Faces," was an American actor during the age of silent films. He was one of the most versatile and powerful actors of early cinema. He is best remembered for his characterizations of tortured, often grotesque and afflicted characters, and his...
- Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, KBE was an English comedic actor and film director. Chaplin became one of the most famous actors as well as a notable filmmaker, composer and musician in the early to mid Classical Hollywood era of American cinema.Chaplin acted in, directed, scripted, produced and...
- Joan Crawford
Joan Crawford was an American actress in film, television and theatre. Starting as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies before debuting on Broadway, Crawford was signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925...
- Bebe Daniels
Bebe Daniels was an American actress, singer, dancer, writer and producer. She began in Hollywood during the silent movie era as a child actress, and later gained fame on radio and television in England...
- Marion Davies
Marion Davies was an American film actress.Davies is best remembered for her relationship with newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, as her high-profile social life often obscured her professional career....
- Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and big band leader.Duke Ellington became one of the most influential artists in the history of recorded music, and is largely recognized as one of the greatest figures in the history of jazz, though his music stretched into...
- Douglas Fairbanks
Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman Fairbanks, Sr., was an American actor, screenwriter, director and producer, best known for his swashbuckling roles in silent films such as The Thief of Bagdad, Robin Hood, and The Mark of Zorro. An astute businessman, Fairbanks was a founding member of United Artists...
- Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo was a Swedish actress during Hollywood's silent film period and part of its Golden Age....
- Janet Gaynor
Janet Gaynor was an American actress.One of the most popular actresses of the silent film era, in 1928 Gaynor became the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performances in three films: Seventh Heaven , Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and Street Angel...
- George Gershwin
George Gershwin was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are universally familiar....
- John Gilbert
John Gilbert may refer to:*John Gilbert , Bishop of Hereford, 1375–1389*John VII Gilbert , Archbishop of York*John Gilbert , land agent and engineer*John Gibbs Gilbert , American comedian...
- Dorothy Gish
Dorothy Elizabeth Gish was an American actress. Born in Dayton, Ohio, she was the younger sister of actress Lillian Gish.-Early life:...
- Lillian Gish
Lillian Diana Gish was an American stage, screen and television actress whose film acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912 to 1987. She was a prominent film star of the 1910s and 1920s, particularly associated with the films of director D.W. Griffith, including her leading role in Griffith's...
- William Haines
Charles William "Billy" Haines was an American film actor and interior designer. A star of the silent era, Haines' career was cut short in the Thirties as a result of his refusal to deny his homosexuality....
- Kelly Harrell
Kelly Harrell was a country music singer in the 1920s. He recorded more than a dozen songs for OKeh and Victor Records and wrote songs which were recorded by other artists, including Jimmie Rodgers and Ernest Stoneman, in his own lifetime.Harrell was born in Draper's Valley, Wythe County, Virginia...
- William S. Hart
William Surrey Hart was an American silent film actor, screenwriter, director and producer.-Biography:...
- Harry Houdini
Harry Houdini was a Hungarian American magician and escapologist, stunt performer, actor and film producer...
- Al Jolson
Al Jolson was an American singer, comedian, and actor. According to PBS, he is considered the "first openly Jewish man to become an entertainment star in America"...
- Buster Keaton
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton VI was an American comic actor and filmmaker. Best known for his silent films, his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".Keaton was recognized as the seventh greatest director of all...
- Harold Lloyd
Harold Clayton Lloyd, Sr. was an American film actor and producer, most famous for his silent comedies....
- Tom Mix
Thomas Edwin Mix was an American film actor and the star of many early Western movies. He made a reported 336 films between 1910 and 1935, all but nine of which were silent features...
- Colleen Moore
Colleen Moore was an American film actress, and one of the most fashionable stars of the silent film era.-Early life:...
- Mae Murray
Mae Murray was an American actress, dancer, film producer, and screenwriter. Murray rose to fame during the silent film era and was known as "The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips" and "The Gardenia of the Screen"....
- Jelly Roll Morton
Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton was an American ragtime and early jazz pianist, bandleader and composer.Widely recognized as a pivotal figure in early jazz, Morton claimed, in self-promotional hyperbole, to have invented jazz outright in 1902...
- Pola Negri
Pola Negri was a Polish film actress who achieved notoriety as a femme fatale in silent films between 1910s and 1930s.-Personal life:...
- Ramon Novarro
Ramón Novarro was a Mexican actor who achieved fame as a "Latin lover" in silent films.-Early life and career:...
- Will Rogers
William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers was a Cherokee-American cowboy, comedian, humorist, social commentator, vaudeville performer and actor. He was the father of U.S. Representative and WWII veteran Will Rogers, Jr....
- Mary Pickford
Mary Pickford was a Canadian motion picture actor, co-founder of the film studio United Artists and one of the original 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Known as "America's Sweetheart," "Little Mary" and "The girl with the curls," she was one of the first Canadian...
- Cole Porter
Cole Albert Porter was an American composer and songwriter. His works include the musical comedies Kiss Me, Kate, Fifty Million Frenchmen, DuBarry Was a Lady and Anything Goes, as well as songs like "Night and Day", "I Get a Kick out of You", "Well, Did You Evah!" and "I've Got You Under My Skin"...
- Norma Shearer
Edith Norma Shearer was a Canadian-American actress. Shearer was one of the most popular actresses in the world from the mid-1920s until her retirement in 1942...
- Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith was an American blues singer.Sometimes referred to as "The Empress of the Blues", Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s, She is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era, and along with Louis Armstrong, a major influence on subsequent...
- Gloria Swanson
Gloria Swanson was an American actress. She was most prominent during the silent film era as both an actress and a fashion icon, especially under the direction of Cecil B. DeMille. She was also one of the first stars to challenge the Hays Code by producing the banned Sadie Thompson in 1928...
- Chief Tahachee
Chief Tahachee was an American-born Old Settler Cherokee Indian who was an author, a stage actor, a film extra, and a vaudeville performer....
- Norma Talmadge
Norma Talmadge was an American actress and film producer of the silent era. A major box office draw for more than a decade, her career reached a peak in the early 1920s, when she ranked among the most popular idols of the American screen.Her most famous film was Smilin’ Through , but she also...
- Rudolph Valentino
Rudolph Valentino was an Italian actor, sex symbol, and early pop icon. Known as the "Latin Lover", he was one of the most popular stars of the 1920s, and one of the most recognized stars from the silent film era. He is best known for his work in The Sheik and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse...
- Rudy Vallee
Rudy Vallée was an American singer, actor, bandleader, and entertainer.-Early life:Born Hubert Prior Vallée in Island Pond, Vermont, the son of Charles Alphonse and Catherine Lynch Vallée...
- Paul Whiteman
Paul Whiteman was an American bandleader and orchestral director.Leader of the most popular dance bands in the United States during the 1920s, Whiteman's recordings were immensely successful, and he was dubbed the "King of Jazz." In 1924, Whiteman commissioned and debuted George Gershwin's...
- Florenz Ziegfeld
Florenz "Flo" Ziegfeld, Jr. was an American Broadway impresario. He is best known for his series of theatrical revues, the Ziegfeld Follies , inspired by the Folies Bergère of Paris. He was known as the "glorifier of the American girl".-Early life and career:Ziegfeld was born in Chicago to German...
Sports figures
- Grover Cleveland Alexander
Grover Cleveland "Old Pete" Alexander was a Major League Baseball pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago Cubs, and St. Louis Cardinals. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1938.-Career:...
(American baseballBaseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond...
player)
- Warwick Armstrong
Warwick Windridge Armstrong was an Australian cricketer who played 50 Test matches between 1902 and 1921. An all-rounder, he captained Australia in ten Test matches between 1920 and 1921 and was undefeated, winning eight Tests and drawing two...
(Australian cricketCricket is a bat-and-ball team sport that is first documented as being played in southern England in the 16th century. By the end of the 18th century, cricket had developed to the point where it had become the national sport of England. The expansion of the British Empire led to cricket being...
captain)
- Ty Cobb
Tyrus Raymond "Ty" Cobb , nicknamed "The Georgia Peach," was a baseball player and is regarded by some historians and journalists as the best player of the dead-ball era, and is generally seen as one of the greatest players of all time.In 1936, Cobb received the most votes of any player on the...
, (American baseballBaseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond...
player)
- Eddie Collins
Edward Trowbridge Collins, Sr. , nicknamed "Cocky", was an American second baseman, manager and executive in Major League Baseball who played from to for the Philadelphia Athletics and Chicago White Sox....
, (American baseballBaseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond...
player)
- Gordon Coventry
Gordon 'Nuts' Coventry was an Australian rules footballer who played for Collingwood Football Club in the Victorian Football League. With 1,299 goals over 18 seasons no football observer could deny that Coventry remains one of the greatest full forwards the game has ever seen...
(Australian rules footballAustralian football, also commonly referred to as Australian rules football, football, or Aussie rules, colloquially as footy, and historically as Australasian football or Victorian football, is a variant of football played between two teams of 18 players, plus four interchange players, outdoors on...
player)
- Jack Dempsey
Jack "Manassa Mauler" Dempsey was an American boxer who held the world heavyweight title from 1919 to 1926. Dempsey's aggressive style and punching power made him one of the most popular boxers in history. Many of his fights set financial and attendance records...
(American boxer)
- Lou Gehrig
Henry Louis "Lou" Gehrig was an American baseball player in the 1920s and 1930s, chiefly remembered for his prowess as a hitter, his consecutive games-played record and its subsequent longevity, and the pathos of his farewell from baseball at age 36, when he was stricken with a fatal disease...
(American baseballBaseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond...
player)
- Red Grange
Harold Edward "Red" Grange was a professional and college American football halfback for the Chicago Bears and the short-lived New York Yankees. He was a charter member of both the College and Pro Football Hall of Fame...
(American footballAmerican football, known in the United States and Canada simply as football, and often as Gridiron or Tackle football outside North America, is a competitive team sport known for combining strategy with physical play. The objective of the game is to score points by advancing the ball into the...
player)
- Alex Grove
Alex Grove is a Scottish rugby union player for Worcester Warriors in the Guinness Premiership.He plays as a centre but can also play on the wing.He attended Rugby School and was vice captain of their first XV.-External links:*...
(American bowler)
- Jack Hobbs
Sir John Berry Hobbs , generally known as Jack Hobbs, was an English cricketer, who played for Surrey and England. Renowned as a very modest and self-effacing man, he was popularly referred to as "The Master". As a batsman, he scored more runs and more centuries in first-class cricket than any...
(Surrey & England cricketer)
- Rogers Hornsby
Rogers Hornsby , nicknamed "The Rajah", was a Major League Baseball second baseman and manager. Hornsby's first name, Rogers, was his mother's maiden name. He spent the majority of his playing career with the St...
(American baseballBaseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond...
player)
- Alex James
Alexander Wilson James was a Scottish footballer, and is most noted for his success with Arsenal, where he is regarded as one of the club's greatest players of all time. James played as an inside forward, as a supporting player for the main strikers...
(Arsenal & Scotland footballer)
- Walter Johnson
Walter Perry Johnson , nicknamed "The Big Train," was a right-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball between 1907 and 1927...
(American baseballBaseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond...
player)
- Bobby Jones
Robert Tyre "Bobby" Jones Jr. was one of the greatest golfers to compete on a national and international level. He participated only as an amateur, primarily on a part-time basis, and chose to retire from competition at age 28.Explaining his decision to retire, Jones said, "It is something like a...
(American golfGolf is a precision club-and-ball sport, in which competing players , using many types of clubs, attempt to hit balls into each hole on a golf course while employing the fewest number of strokes. Golf is one of the few ball games that does not require a standardized playing area...
er)
- Kenesaw Mountain Landis
Kenesaw Mountain Landis was an American jurist who served as a federal judge from 1905 to 1922, and subsequently as the first commissioner of organized baseball, including both the American and National leagues and the governing body of minor league baseball, the National Association of...
(American BaseballBaseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond...
Commissioner)
- Suzanne Lenglen
Suzanne Rachel Flore Lenglen was a French tennis player who won 31 Grand Slam titles between 1914 and 1926. A flamboyant, trendsetting athlete, she was the first female tennis celebrity and one of the first international female sport stars, named La Divine by the French press.- Early life :A...
(French tennisTennis is a sport played between two players or between two teams of two players each . Each player uses a strung racquet to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court....
player )
- Helen Wills Moody
Helen Newington Wills Roark , also known as Helen Wills Moody, was an American tennis player. She has been described as "the first American born woman to achieve international celebrity as an athlete."...
(American tennis player)
- Paavo Nurmi
Paavo Johannes Nurmi was a Finnish runner. Born in Turku, he was known as one of the "Flying Finns"; a term given to him, Hannes Kolehmainen, Ville Ritola and others for their distinction in running...
(Finnish runner)
- Wilfred Rhodes
Wilfred Rhodes was an English professional cricketer who holds the world records for both the most appearances made and the most wickets taken in first-class cricket. He played for Yorkshire and England, making 1110 appearances in first-class cricket from 1898 to 1930, including 58 in Test cricket...
(Yorkshire & England cricketer)
- Fanny "Bobbie" Rosenfeld
Fanny Rosenfeld December 28, 1904, in Dneipropetrovsk, Russia —November 14, 1969) was a Canadian athlete, who earned a gold medal for the 400 metre relay and a silver medal for the 100 metre at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam...
(Canadian athlete)
- Babe Ruth
George Herman Ruth, Jr. , also popularly known as "Babe" Ruth, "The Bambino", and "The Sultan of Swat", was an American Major League baseball player from –...
(American baseballBaseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond...
player)
- Tris Speaker
Tristram E. Speaker , nicknamed “Spoke” and “Grey Eagle” , was an American baseball player known as one of the best offensive and defensive center fielders in history...
, (American baseballBaseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The goal is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or diamond...
player)
- Herbert Sutcliffe
Herbert Sutcliffe was an English cricketer who is universally regarded as one of the greatest-ever opening batsmen. His Test batting average of 60.73 is the fourth highest of any player with a completed career, behind only Don Bradman, Graeme Pollock and George Headley...
(Yorkshire & England cricketer)
- Bill Tilden
William Tatem Tilden II , nicknamed "Big Bill," is often considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time. An American tennis player who was the World No...
(American tennis player)
- Johnny Weismuller (swimming)