Assume One of the Following Identities: A) a Radical Political

question 25

Essay

Assume one of the following identities: a) a radical political revolutionary, b) an immigrant low-wage worker, c) an industrialist, d) a sports hero, e) a single modern woman in her twenties, f) a black civil rights activist in the South, g) a black jazz musician in Chicago or Harlem, or h) aspiring modernist artist or writer. Would you like to have lived in the America of the 1920s? Why or why not? Explain what you find most alluring about life in America during the 1920s and what adverse developments might have led you to leave America during that decade.

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Definitions:

Chemical Warfare

The use of chemical substances as weapons in military conflicts to harm, incapacitate, or kill enemy combatants or civilians.

Hysteria

An outdated term historically used to describe a wide range of psychological disorders characterized by exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement.

Thanatos

In Freudian psychology, a concept representing the death drive or instinct, which coexists with the life instinct (Eros) and drives aggressive and destructive behavior.

Psychic Epidemics

Phenomena in which large numbers of people begin to engage in unusual behaviors that appear to have a psychological origin.