I spend a lot of time talking about RPG materials, and not nearly as much time talking about inspiration. Today I'm recommending a book series: American Decades, published by Gale Research. Various authors and editors, but the copy I have in my hands is 1930-39 edited by Victor Bondi. I also have the 1920-29 and the 1980-89.
I first discovered these back when I was working on the Prohibition supplement for Call of Cthulhu. I was working on that in the happy carefree pre-Wikipedia era, and you might think that the internet has supplanted books like these. Well, you're right - to a degree. So long as you don't mind floundering in a sea of links and seemingly unrelated tangents, or relying on what might turn out to be a poorly researched YouTube rant.
Price tag varies. Amazon alleges you can get these new for stupid money, but you don't need new. You need second-hand, ex-library copies. Mine comes courtesy of the Johnson County Library, wherever that is. Ex-library can be had for less than $10 plus shipping.
Why recommend this series? There must be other, better sources, right? Again, yes - to a degree.
I'm recommending these as a solid first stop for any project set in the US. It's not a deep-dive. It covers everything from world events, politics and the economy to fashion, lifestyle, media and sports. It's the whole package, 600-700 pages long.
So if you're thinking about a scenario idea that involves, say, sports, and you know very little about what sports were popular in the 1930s, American Decades can give you the basics, and also short biographies of important people active in that field at that time. It's not exhaustive, but it doesn't have to be. All it has to do is give you a starting point. You can conduct any follow-up research yourself.
From the Sports section:
America's Queen of Bowling
Never too late. America's greatest woman bowler in the 1930s was thirty-five before she even bowled her first game in 1923 - but Colorado's Floretta Doty McCutcheon kept getting better and better at it. By 1927 she was beginning to secure her reputation with a series of high-scoring games and exhibitions, and on 18 December she defeated world champion Jimmy Smith in a challenge match, making sports headlines across the country. When she went on tour for the Brunswick Corporation a year later, she was already something of a legend. She told women they could begin bowling at almost any age and in any physical shape.
Role model. Throughout the 1930s she continued to bowl professionally; she also gave free lessons at bowling alleys around the country and through the Mrs. McCutcheon School of Bowling, sponsored by local newspapers. She toured from 1930 to her retirement in 1938, organizing leagues and teaching classes for high school and college students. She saw bowling as one sport in which men and women could compete equally ...
OK, hands up if you'd ever heard of Floretta McCutcheon before now. Put those hands down, you fibbers.
That's where this book comes in handy. No matter how much of a polymath you believe yourself to be there's always something you don't know. Like Helene Mayer, the Jewish German fencer who fled Germany for the US to avoid persecution, and fenced for Germany in the 1936 Olympics. Or the Rhens, a black basketball team from Harlem, New York, the best team in the sport between 1932 to 1936. Or Hold That Co-Ed, a 1938 film in which a girl dresses up as a boy to win a football game.
But OK, you cry, Wikipedia exists. Why get this when I have that for free?
Well, why do you buy Investigators' Handbooks? Players Guides? Keeper's Kits? You buy those things to have all those period details together in one place so you don't vanish down a clickhole of entwined links when all you want to know is what speakeasies were like. That's why you need these books.
Probably the best thing about American Decades - incredibly cheap on the secondhand market, I reiterate, maybe $6-7 per plus shipping - from a Cthulhuhounds' perspective is the series divides itself up into decades. Playing Fall of Delta Green? Get 1960-69 for maybe $9. Trail of Cthulhu? 1930-39 is maybe $5 on the second hand market.
Will it cover every possible topic in exhaustive detail? God no. But in 600-700 pages it will cover most topics in some detail, and give you leads that you might not have found otherwise.
It doesn't do Victoriana, which is a shame. Its earliest volume is 1900, which by its nature must cover some 1890s material but not in any kind of detail. The latest volume goes to 2009, but TBH I doubt most of you will need that.
Put it to you this way. If you're coming to Call, Trail, Fall, or any of the other Cthulhu variants for the first time and you want to run games, or write them, then you want something like this in your research library. It won't be the last book you buy. God no. But it will be one you turn to time and again when you want to remind yourself what the politics were like then, or the technology, or what was in the news, or who was important in, say, the film business.
It's a solid first step. It's cheap. Plus, it's big enough to use as a doorstop.
Bonus!
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