We look back at the 1920s from the 2020s and ask what happened then and what is happening now. Despite major changes, there are similarities that are not analogous but homologous (crises, pandemics, etc.). The American historian Bradley W. Hart, who received the Sybil Halpern Milton Memorial Book Prize in 2019, is a professor at California State University and an expert on this historical period, on which he has published several books. In this essay, he portrays an unstable, contradictory, perilous and fascinating decade when ‘there was no return to normality’ and anything seemed possible.