Dear internet, clearly this is important.

[vorindi]

3rdragon and I are writing a story in which several people (from now-ish) end up in 1928. I'm trying to decide what they know about the time period.

So, internet, what are the first few things you think of when you think of the 1920s? (Our intrepid time-travelers do not have internet access, so please don't google for information first.)

Comments

[relique]

uuuuh...

flappers, prohibition, speakeasies, card games, some cars..... I think the influenza thing may have been earlier. or maybe just the very beginning of the 20s? i forget.

weren't early bits of Fried Green Tomatoes set in the 20s?

[vorindi]

Influenza was 1918, I think. And I have no idea about Fried Green Tomatoes (um, mostly because I had to look it up to even find out what it is).

[3rdragon]

New Trenham, Connecticut, USA.

You would recognize some of the characters, too. We had this flash of insight that life would be SO MUCH EASIER if we stopped trying to research/make up stuff about a psuedo-UK, and just made stuff up about a psuedo-US, instead.

Mind you, we still don't know anything about the 1920's. Or at least, we didn't a week ago. I can now tell you how much it costs to rent a room for a week at the YMCA in 1928, or buy a man's straw hat.

[vorindi]

We did think of that--(not so much the publishing in specific, but that your Trenham was yours)--we started with someplace that shared a lot of placenames but probably not that much else with your Trenham, planning to change these things before showing it to anyone, and it's rather diverged since (and not solely because we realized that we know more about the US).

But, you know, it has all the characters we made for trenham_rp in it, so the tag seemed as appropriate as anything, in case someone for some reason needs to find this post again.

And good luck with publishing! Or revising or querying or whatever stage of the process you're at! (Because clearly exclamation points are helpful.)

[astaraelweeper]

Flappers. Dorothy Parker. The golden age of the red carpet movie theaters, with their gilded art deco decor. Easy credit, and very high income inequality, at least in the U.S. Washing machines and automobiles are first becoming available to ordinary people. (What's that quote about never expecting to be so rich as to own a car or so poor as to be unable to afford a maid?) Almost everyone smokes. Women's suffrage is new, and still a topic of hot debate, and people aren't quite sure what to think about it. Railroads are still the dominant mode of transportation around the U.S. and Europe, and ships across the Atlantic. The stock market crash will not come until the fall of 1929

[vorindi]

They're working on getting a newspaper. The bit where all of their money hasn't technically been minted yet is slowing this down a little.

[astaraelweeper]

If they're in a populated area, can't they participate in the time-honored tradition of swiping an old/used one from a cafe, train station, or other place where people tended to leave them?

[vorindi]

. . . Yes. Yes they could.

[harp_of_israfel]

Well, I'm a Chicago native, so I have a mental setup that might not work for another setting, but the first thing I go to is gangsters, Capone and Moran and their ilk, smuggling Canadian liquor, wine bricks and bathtub gin, detectives and beautiful dames in trouble (though the film genre is obviously more thirties), society girls rebelling with short skirts and jazz bands, corrupt government, ghost stories, earnest immigrants and country kids caught in a wave of crime and fast-paced glamor they weren't prepared to cope with. I belong to the original Sin City, so that's just me.

[3rdragon]

People who don't read your lj contribute:

"Coal strikes, communist paranoia, prohibition, jazz age, marcelled hair"

and

"Um, flappers.
Buying stocks on the margin...
Did I tell you I was terrible at history?"

[3rdragon]

Also,

"WEEEEEEEllllllll... they say golly jee and jakers a lot
all the gals wear headbands
and bonnets in some cases
Al Capone was alive
and not in prison
swing was popular
"The Roaring 20s"
music and art were exploding everywhere and the economy was up
its right after WWI
and right before WWII"

[3rdragon]

"I think henry ford did his shnanigans whith the assembly line
and if that happed then, then the bessamer steel process came into being then too"