Does the "jazz age" sound like an accurate description of the 1920s
World War I had spurred the Great Migration, in which some 500,000 African Americans left the South to seek jobs in Northern factories. The black culture and music that these migrants brought to Chicago, New York, and other cities flourished in the 1920s. Jazz, a complex, improvisational musical style that originated in New Orleans, thrilled many Americans in the twenties. Indeed, the decade was often known as the jazz age. Black writers and artists in New York created what was termed the Harlem Renaissance. This artistic movement, an extraordinary outburst of creativity, transformed American culture by infusing the nation's artistic and intellectual life with African-Americans' perspective. This perspective had been shaped by centuries of slavery and discrimination, by traditional African culture, and by the experience of migrating from the rural South to the urban North.