I hope you get a good answer! It interests me greatly, too. One thing that has helped me as an armchair historian is the reading of biographies from whatever given period I'm interested in. Presidents, politicians, athletes, actors, biographies of these people have all really helped bring their times to life.

For the period you're talking about, you've got expansion and industrialization, two world wars, a jazz age and a Depression. What about reading some biopgraphies of:

-F. Scott Fitzgerald -Theodore Roosevelt -John D. Rockefeller -baseball player Ty Cobb -there's a great one on Jack Dempsey that really gets into this era and how it changed - i believe it's called A Flame of Pure Fire by Roger Kahn