1926: A brave new world

When a young Mahatma Gandhi headed the Indian National Congress in 1920, he consolidated his campaign for "swaraj," or self-rule, in Britain's largest colony via a strategy of peaceful, nonviolent protest. Independence movements in British colonies like Ireland, Cyprus and Iraq also took root throughout the 1920s. Gandhi's epic struggle for self-rule would not be realized until 1947.

In 1918, women over the age of 30 received the right to vote in Britain, a right achieved in most Western nations by 1920. However, women continued to agitate for equal suffrage rights with men. In 1926, the Young Suffragists broke through the gate at Buckingham Palace in an attempt to present a letter to King George V advocating full suffrage for women. They achieved their goal in 1928.

An African-American performer who in 1925 escaped from a conservative, segregated US also constrained by prohibition, Josephine Baker liberated herself on European stages where she didn't have to conceal her body, or apparently her love of both men and women. Expressing a raw, unadulterated sexuality on stage, Baker was a symbol of emancipation who would inspire women for generations to come.

Rebellious, promiscuous, sexually amorphous, glamorous - and lost and disillusioned - the bright young things were a group of postwar artists, authors and intellectuals who partied their way through 1920s England. Socialite Stephen Tennant (above), and writers Noël Coward, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, who described this wild generation in his heralded novel, "Vile Bodies," were at the vanguard.

Following escalating strikes in the mining industry in response to reduced wages and increased working hours, around 2 million workers participated in a 10-day general strike - the longest ever - across Britain on May 3, 1926. With essential services cut and the nation at a standstill, this watershed was not remembered for its success: workers were ultimately forced to accept lower pay.

In Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel "The Sun Also Rises," his first major success, he talked about a "lost generation" of people his own age contemptuous of war, capitalism and the American dream. Like Hemingway, some ended up in Paris looking for inspiration, including Irish writer James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose 1925 novel "The Great Gatsby" chronicles the hollow excesses of the age.