Encyclopedia of the Jazz Age, 2 Volumes

The Jazz Age was a decade of contrasts. While the popular image of the Roaring Twenties—one of a booming economy and carefree cultural excess—captures the general spirit of the times, the reality was far more nuanced and diverse.
Rarely had American big business done better than in the 1920s, with productivity and profits, not to mention stock prices, rising to unprecedented levels. The decade also saw stagnating wages, a labor movement in retreat, and persistent hard times on America's farms. The early part of the decade was marked by one of the most corruption-ridden administrations in U.S. history—that of Warren G. Harding—while its middle years saw the White House occupied by one of the most restrained and sober presidents of modern times—Calvin Coolidge.
New technology, most notably the automobile and the radio, united city and country as never before, forging a truly national popular culture. Yet the 1920s also witnessed a new divisiveness. Native-born Americans erected barriers against new immigrants, race relations deteriorated into rioting, and a mass exodus of blacks from the segregated and oppressive South swelled the urban centers of the Northeast, Midwest, and West.