Transcript Cultural and Intellectual Trends

Cultural and Intellectual
Trends
Chapter 9 Section 4
• Inventions in
Century
started a revolution in mass
communication
• Marconi transmitted radio
signal across the Atlantic
• Radio broadcasting facilities
sprang up across the world
• Motion picture camera
emerged in 1890s
• After WWI, full length movies
began to appear
• The American film Birth of a
Nation was the U.S.’s first
blockbuster
• By 1939, 40% of adults went to
the movies once a week
• Hitler said without
automobiles, sound films, and
radios, the Nazism would
never have grown
• Radios and movies were used
to spread propaganda
19th
A. Culture:
Radio and Movies
B. Mass Leisure
• After WWI, work patterns provided people with
more leisure time
• By 1920, the 8-hour workday had become normal
for most workers
• People began to spend their leisure time going to
sporting events and other activities
• People traveled a lot due to trains, buses, and cars
• Nazis began to offer activities for the working class
to fill their time
– Concerts, operas, films, and vacations
C. Artistic and Literary
Trends
• After WWI, people were shocked by
human behavior
• Many thought humans to be
nothing more than animals,
incapable of producing a rational
world
• Dada Art
– Artists obsessed w/ the idea
that life has no purpose
– Revolted by the “insanity of life”
– Artist Hannah Hoch used
Photomontage to comment on
women’s roles in mass culture
– Her work was part of the first
Dada show in Berlin
• After 1918, Abstract Art
especially Surrealism became
popular
• -this sought art sought reality
beyond the material world by
portraying odd and sometimes
scary pictures
• Salvador Dali was the most
famous surreal artist
• He painted everyday things out
of context
• Architecture also changed after
the war
• Modernism emerged in which
buildings were created that
united function and technology
• Writers at the time also wrote
about the unconscious
D. The Heroic Age of Physics
• During the 1920s, physicists
realized that an atom could
be split
• German phyisicist Werner
Heisenberg came up with
what he called the
Uncertainty Principle
• This said that all physical
laws are based on
uncertainty and
randomness
• This challenged the old
theories that said physical
laws were based on
certainty