Downton Abbey Season 4: Recap & History | 1922 - 1923

A recap of Season 4 with all the historical events the Crawley’s and their staff somehow wound up involved in.
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Join brothers Brandon and Nevin on their crazy trip through time as they dive into some of the weirdest (but true!) and most interesting bits of world history. Laughing Historically is a fun educational web show that’s teacher/classroom friendly and great for kids of all ages!
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Transcript:
Rape, murder, and horny princes, Here’s what happened in real life and the fourth season of Downton Abbey.
SEASON FOUR Opens in 1922, six months on and Lady Mary is just starting to recover from Matthew wanting to do movies. Six months of mourning in the 1920’s would have been seen as a bit too Victorian, as by that time, most thought Queen Victoria’s lifelong public withdrawal and mourning of her dead husband, Albert, was damaging to the country - and remarriage was becoming pretty common.
Out of nowhere, O’Brien is off the show as her character sneaks off to India to work for Robert’s Cousin, Susan MacClare, whose husband has been transferred there due to the growing tension - which would have been Gandhi's nonviolent civil disobedience against the British. He was arrested in March 1922, one month after O’Brien goes to India - coincidence?
Lady Mary is named Matthew’s sole heir, which thanks to The Finance Act of 1919, called for an up to 40% tax, but brings her into partnership with her father and Branson. This is still an extremely hard time for women to better themselves. They still didn’t have full voting rights and were still being denied admittance to universities, such as Cambridge.
Edith goes to London to see her editor Michael Gregson and meets Virginia Woolf, one of the most important modernist writers in the 20th century, at the center of the London Bloomsbury Group. Michael Gregson wants to use the war torn shambles of Germany to marry Edith and get around the fact that his wife is in an asylum. Post World War I, blamed for the whole thing, Germany’s laws were rapidly changing and economy collapsing, leading to a democracy which would go very very wrong.
To the utter complete silenced shock of everyone, Rose meets, dates, engages, and then isn’t engaged to a black AMERICAN Jazz singer. Evolving from slave music in America, Jazz exploded out of the states in the 1920’s aided by the underground drinking clubs of prohibition, and began to grow in popularity in Europe in 1919 after the Original Dixieland Jazz band toured England.
To help Cora's brother, Paul Giamatti, Lord Grantham takes awful Thomas to America (so at least he he isn't in a handful of episodes). Crossing the atlantic in the 1920’s would have been by ship and taken about 4.5 days each way, that is, until 1936, when the Queen Mary would reduce the trip to a brisk 4 days.
Paul Giamatti was mixed up in the Teapot Dome Scandal, which took place during the presidency of Warden G Harding and involved the Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall leasing navy oil reserves to private companies for cheap. It would be seen as the biggest scandal in American politics until Nixon buys a tape recorder.
Lord Grantham returns from America and boy does he need a drink, as by this time, American prohibition was in full swing to the bewilderment of Europe. Silly Americans.
Later, In London for Rose’s presentation to the Queen, the family meets Edward, the Prince of Wales and gets mixed up with a letter that he wrote to his married lover Mrs. Freda Dudley Ward. This romance did happen, but ended when the prince met Wallis Simpson, the twice divorced woman for whom he would abdicate the throne in 1936 to marry months into his reign as King of England.
Also, Mary fell in the mud, a refrigerator is forced upon Mrs. Patmore, Branson continued to be a socialist, Edith gets pregnant by Michael Gregson before he disappears in Germany so she runs to Switzerland, Anna is raped, Bates maybe killed the man who raped her, and Isis attended a Church Bazaar.

[@myfavoritethespian8199]

you forgot the dowager countess becomes ill with bronchitis