Timeline: US 1919 – 1929
from Infoplease

1919 - Prohibition, the legal prevention of the manufacture, transportation and sale of alcoholic beverages.

1920 - Women's suffrage (19th) amendment ratified. Treaty of Sèvres dissolves Ottoman Empire. First Agatha Christie mystery. Sinclair Lewis's Main Street.

1921 - In U.S., Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchists, convicted of armed robbery murder; case stirs worldwide protests; they are executed in 1927.

1923 - Widespread Ku Klux Klan violence in U.S.  George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Bessie Smith, known as “the Empress of the Blues,” makes her first record.

1924- Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall and oilmen Harry Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny are charged with conspiracy and bribery in the Teapot Dome scandal, involving fraudulent leases of naval oil reserves. In 1931, Fall is sentenced to year in prison; Doheny and Sinclair acquitted of bribery. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb convicted in “thrill killing” of Bobby Franks in Chicago; defended by Clarence Darrow; sentenced to life imprisonment. (Loeb killed by fellow convict in 1936; Leopold paroled in 1958, dies in 1971.) Robert Frost wins first of four Pulitzers.

1925 - Nellie Tayloe Ross elected governor of Wyoming; first woman governor elected in U.S. . John T. Scopes convicted and fined for teaching evolution in a public school in Tennessee “Monkey Trial”; sentence set aside.

1926 - Gertrude Ederle of U.S. is first woman to swim English Channel. Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

 

1927 - Philo T. Farnsworth demonstrates working television model. Georges Lemaître proposes Big Bang Theory. Babe Ruth hits 60 home runs in the season; record stands for next 34 years. The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson, first part-talking motion picture.

1928 - Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin. Richard E. Byrd starts expedition to Antarctic; returns in 1930. Anthropologist Margaret Mead publishes Coming of Age in Samoa.

1929 - In U.S., stock market prices collapse, with U.S. securities losing $26 billion—first phase of Depression and world economic crisis. St. Valentine's Day gangland massacre in Chicago.