Pic 1: Aviator and hero of fascist Italy Francesco de Pinedo with the Italian ambassador in Washington, DC, on 27 April 1927.
Pic 2: Aviators Charles Nungesser and François Coli, who took off from Paris in L’Oiseau Blanc on 8 May.
Pic 3: Ruth Snyder, adulterous housewife and tabloid sensation of 1927 along with her lover, Judd Gray.
Pic 4: Judd Gray.
Pic 5: Charles Lindbergh, to whom the experience of fame brought little joy.
Pic 6: The Great Mississippi Flood, which put an area the size of Scotland under water.
Pic 7: Herbert Hoover with child victims of the flood.
Pic 8: The flapper: the archetypal figure of the era.
Pic 9: Al Capone, the famed Chicago gangster.
Pic 10: Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Capone’s nemesis.
Pic 11: Thirty-seven children were killed when the maniac Andrew Kehoe blew up the local elementary school.
Pic 12: Lindbergh with Sir Alan Cobham and the American ambassador Myron Herrick greet the crowd outside the Aéro-Club in Paris.
Pic 13: Lindbergh’s plane after arriving at Croydon Aerodrome in Surrey.
Pic 14: Babe Ruth and his heavy, 54-ounce bat.
Pic 15: The instrument of Ruth’s greatness was his heavy, 54-ounce bat.
Pic 16: Clarence Chamberlin, pilot of the Columbia, with the plane’s owner, Charles Levine, after landing in Germany.
Pic 17: ‘Shipwreck’ Kelly atop the Francis Hotel in Newark, where he remained for 12 days in June 1927.
Pic 18: Dwight Morrow, banker, ambassador, aviation industry pioneer and eventual father-in-law of Charles Lindbergh.
Pic 19: Lindbergh’s appearance on the Washington mall on 11 June 1927, which attracted the largest crowd in the city’s history to date.
Pic 20: Lindbergh’s ticker-tape parade up Broadway on 13 June 1927, which drew an enraptured crowd of between four and five million.
Pic 21: Wayne B. Wheeler, fanatical head of the Anti-Saloon League.
Pic 22: The Cotton Club in Harlem, the place to go for people who liked music with their illegal booze.
Pic 23: Texas Guinan, premier nightclub hostess of the era.
Pic 24: In order to prevent industrial alcohol being used as a beverage, Wheelerites insisted that it be ‘denatured’ and thus rendered poisonous.
Pic 25: The famed (and vainglorious) explorer Richard Byrd with his crew Bert Acosta, George Noville and Bernt Balchen in front of the America.
Pic 26: Forty-three hours later when Byrd and his crew were forced to ditch their plane in the waters off Ver-sur-Mer, France.
Pic 27: Albert B. Fall and Edward Doheny, who stood trial in Washington for their roles in the Teapot Dome bribery and corruption scandal.
Pic 28: Nan Britton, the mistress of Warren G. Harding, and the child she had by him.
Pic 29: Calvin Coolidge in full cowboy regalia.
Pic 30: Four lords of finance, Hjalmar Schacht, Benjamin Strong, Sir Montagu Norman and Charles Rist, who made a fateful decision to lower interest rates.
Pic 31: Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, friends despite vast differences in temperament and habits.
Pic 32: Henry Ford, automotive titan and anti-Semitic crackpot.
Pic 33: Henry Ford’s most ambitious project – Fordlandia, a model American community intended to produce rubber in the jungles of Brazil.
Pic 34: Bartolomeo Vanzetti, fish vendor (left), and Nicola Sacco, shoemaker, Italian immigrants whose convictions for murder and death sentences made them an international cause célèbre.
Pic 35: Gutzon Borglum views a model for his presidential sculptures on Mount Rushmore.
Pic 36: Lindbergh stopped on his cross-country barnstorming tour to meet Henry Ford, who took a short flight with him in the Spirit of St Louis.
Pic 37: Cleveland’s Union Terminal, at the time the second tallest building in America.
Pic 38: Brothers Mantis and Oris Van Sweringen, two of the oddest business titans America has ever produced.
Pic 39: Cinemas were constructed on the scale of palaces, as this interior shot of the Roxy Theatre demonstrates.
Pic 40: Clara Bow in Wings.
Pic 41: Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.
Pic 42: Robert G. Elliott, America’s top executioner.
Pic 43: Financial chicanery: Charles Ponzi, whose famed ‘scheme’ involved postal reply coupons.
Pic 44: Sacco and Vanzetti’s funeral procession through Boston attracted many thousands of viewers.
Pic 45: Philo T. Farnsworth, luckless inventor and ‘father of television’.
Pic 46: David Sarnoff, who stole Farnsworth’s ideas and made television commercially viable.
Pic 47: Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a federal judge who became commissioner of baseball after the ‘Black Sox’ scandal and may have ‘saved’ the game.
Pic 48: Jack Dempsey, having knocked down Gene Tunney, finally makes it to a neutral corner during the still-controversial ‘long count’.