Allen, a journalist, wrote Only Yesterday in 1931, so its perspective on life in the Roaring '20s is deeply colored by the descent into the Great Depression that immediately succeeded it.

Fraser's grand history of Wall Street's image and reality in American culture encompasses much more than the 1920s: the book traces the American stock market's place in our society from 1792 into the 21st century.

Though Over Here focuses mainly on the period just preceding the Roaring '20s—the Great War era—its closing chapters deftly explain how the war unleashed the very illiberal tendencies in American society that ended the Progressive era and doomed Woodrow Wilson's idealistic vision to failure.

A Pulitzer Prize winner, Larson's engaging account of the circus-like 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial"—in which a Tennessee schoolteacher was charged for teaching evolution—provides much useful cultural context for understanding the controversial intersection between religion and science.