Florida US History EOC Module 3, the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression: a complete overview of the 1920s boom, cultural conflict, the crash, the Dust Bowl, and the New Deal

What Module 3 actually demands

Module 3 runs from the boom of the 1920s to the bust of the 1930s and the government's response: the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, roughly 1920 to 1940. On the EOC the 1920s material sits in Reporting Category 1, while the Depression and New Deal sit in Reporting Category 2 (Global Military, Political, and Economic Challenges). It explains how prosperity and mass culture transformed life, why the decade was also one of sharp cultural conflict, how the economy collapsed, how an environmental disaster compounded the misery, and how Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal reshaped American government. The dominant skills are cause and effect and classification, plus reading economic graphs and photographs.

This guide ties together the matching dot-point pages, each with its own practice questions: the Roaring Twenties, the cultural conflicts of the 1920s, the causes of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the New Deal, and the impact of the New Deal.

The Roaring Twenties

The 1920s boomed on mass production (Henry Ford's assembly line and the Model T), a consumer economy built on advertising and buying on credit, and new technology, the automobile, the radio, and the movies, that created a shared mass culture. The Harlem Renaissance produced a flowering of African American literature and jazz, and the flapper symbolized new freedoms for young women after the Nineteenth Amendment. The prosperity was real but uneven, and the credit and speculation that drove it left the economy fragile.

The cultural conflicts of the 1920s

Beneath the prosperity, old and new America clashed. Prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment) banned alcohol but fueled speakeasies, bootlegging, and organized crime. The first Red Scare and the Palmer Raids targeted suspected radicals. Nativism produced immigration quotas (the Emergency Quota and National Origins Acts) that slashed immigration from southern and eastern Europe. A revived Ku Klux Klan targeted Catholics, Jews, and immigrants as well as African Americans. And the Scopes Trial (1925) dramatized the clash between fundamentalist religion and modern science over teaching evolution.

The causes of the Great Depression

The stock market crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression, but the deeper causes were speculation and buying on margin, overproduction, an unequal distribution of wealth, excessive consumer debt, and bank failures, worsened by the high Hawley-Smoot Tariff. The impact was catastrophic: about 25 percent unemployment by 1933, lost homes and savings, breadlines, and shantytowns called Hoovervilles. President Hoover's limited response cost him reelection.

The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl struck the southern Great Plains in the 1930s, caused by drought combined with poor farming practices that had stripped the native grasses holding the soil. Giant dust storms ruined farms and drove hundreds of thousands of "Okies" west to California, where they often met poverty and prejudice. The disaster deepened the Depression in rural America and led the New Deal to promote soil conservation.

The New Deal

Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal answered the Depression with the "three Rs": Relief (jobs through the WPA and CCC), Recovery (rebuilding the economy), and Reform (lasting change such as the TVA, the FDIC, the SEC, and above all Social Security). Its biggest legacy was a permanent expansion of federal power. It did not fully end the Depression (World War II did), and it was attacked from the right (too much government) and the left (not enough), with the constitutional fight peaking in the failed court-packing plan of 1937.

Check your knowledge

A mix of recall and application questions covering Module 3. Attempt them under timed conditions, then check against the solutions.

1. Explain how mass production changed American consumption in the 1920s. (2 marks)
2. Define the Harlem Renaissance and name one figure associated with it. (2 marks)
3. State one major unintended effect of Prohibition. (2 marks)
4. Explain how the immigration quotas of the 1920s reflected nativism. (2 marks)
5. Identify three causes of the Great Depression. (3 marks)
6. Explain why buying on margin was dangerous. (2 marks)
7. Identify the two main causes of the Dust Bowl. (2 marks)
8. Explain how the Dust Bowl affected farm families. (2 marks)
9. State the three Rs of the New Deal and define each. (3 marks)
10. Explain why the Social Security Act is considered a "reform." (2 marks)
11. Explain one criticism of the New Deal from the right and one from the left. (2 marks)