Great Depression 
-
-
SOURCE: Jacobin
8/20/2021
The Contemporary US Right’s Roots in 1930s Union-Busting: Interview with Kathryn Olmsted
The New Deal's support for labor rights pushed the large California agricultural interests, who previously embraced "big government" irrigation projects, to an aggressive anti-statist position based in keeping control over their workplaces and their profits.
-
-
SOURCE: JStor Daily
8/2/2021
The Photographers Who Captured the Great Depression
Intended as a promotional program for New Deal agricultural programs, the Farm Security Adminstration's sponsorship of Gordon Parks, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and other photographers sparked an aesthetic revolution.
-
-
SOURCE: The New Republic
6/15/2021
When the Government Supported Writers
by Max Holleran
"With its reminder that creative labor was once seen—like a strategic reserve of fuel, weapons, or medical supplies—as worthy of federal protection, Republic of Detours mobilizes New Deal history to help us imagine what our society would be like if federal tax dollars supported a reserve army of muralists, poets, and oral historians."
-
-
SOURCE: JStor Daily
4/19/2021
How the LAPD Guarded California’s Borders in the 1930s
Los Angeles's conservative establishment used tropes of cultural inferiority to justify efforts to stop poor white Dust Bowl refugees from entering the state in the 1930s,
-
-
SOURCE: New York Times
4/16/2021
F.D.R. Didn’t Just Fix the Economy
Times columnist Jamelle Bouie draws on the work of historian Eric Rauchway to argue that Franklin Roosevelt envisioned the New Deal as a renewal of core democratic principles that the government should serve the needs of the people and be accountable to them.
-
-
SOURCE: The Nation
11/17/2020
Whitewashing the Great Depression (Review)
Three new books describe the role of administrator Roy Stryker of the Farm Security Administration in filtering the photographic work of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Russell Lee to emphasize the depression's burden on rural whites.
-
-
SOURCE: TIME
11/12/2020
America's Crises Would Be Daunting for Any President-Elect. But History Can Teach Biden to Navigate Them
by Jon Meacham
A popular historian who has been advising Joe Biden with historical perspective argues the president-elect is disposed to empathy and pragmatism and will work to ease the nation's divisions.
-
-
SOURCE: New York Times
10/6/2020
John Steinbeck, Bard of the American Worker (Review)
Hailing him as a “major figure in American literature,” Souder further claims Steinbeck has “given the world several books that would last forever.”
-
-
SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
8/31/2020
Millions of Young Men Toiled in FDR’s ’Tree Army’ to Help End the Great Depression. Could it Work Again?
Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley of Oregon are introducing legislation for a revived version of the New Deal-Era Civilian Conservation Corps, seeking to create jobs in forestry, parks, and land conservation.
-
-
SOURCE: LitHub
7/29/2020
Once Upon a Time, When America Paid Its Writers
In Jason Boog’s new book, "The Deep End," he offers colorful and often grim profiles of nine Depression-era writers and connects their stories to the struggles that writers face today. Even before our current economic crisis, it was a depressingly apt comparison.
-
-
SOURCE: Nursing Clio
7/21/2020
The Children’s Nutrition and Dental Clinics of Mobile: Public Health, Volunteerism, and the Color Line during the Great Depression
by Daryn Glassbrook
The Depression did not create a hunger and malnutrition crisis in the United States. It brought to the fore deep-seated structural weaknesses in our economic, political, and health systems that enabled this crisis to boil over.
-
-
SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
7/22/2020
A Job Guarantee Costs Far Less Than Unemployment
The bold policy for not just weathering the crisis, but coming out better.
-
-
7/12/2020
Re-stabilizing the Middle Class and the Poor: Lessons from the 1930s
by David Stebenne
For a long time it seemed as though the 1930s era of high unemployment was a kind of “great exception” in American history, but now it has appeared again, suddenly and unexpectedly, just as it did in the early 1930s.
-
-
SOURCE: TomDispatch
5/28/2020
The Great Depression, Coronavirus Style: Crashes, Then and Now
by Nomi Prins
Monetary policy responses to the current crisis can't fix either the structural problems that make the economy vulnerable to severe disruption or the virus and public health crisis that underlie that disruption. Governments must choose to take coordinated action on multiple fronts.
-
-
SOURCE: JSTOR Daily
5/20/2020
One Parallel for the Coronavirus Crisis? The Great Depression
Historians Erk Loomis and Michael Goldfield are among an interdisciplinary group of scholars describing the process by which the New Deal transformed American society.
-
-
SOURCE: TIME
5/19/2020
When the Economy Collapses, Talk Is Cheap—Just Look What Led Up to the Great Depression
by Robert Dallek
For American leaders, the Great Depression is as much a lesson in what not to do as it is in what to do.
-
-
SOURCE: New York Times
5/18/2020
7.7 Million Young People Are Unemployed. We Need a New ‘Tree Army.’
by Collin O'Mara
Today, there’s plenty to do for a revitalized conservation corps that would put young Americans back to work.
-
-
SOURCE: Capita
5/15/2020
Lessons for a Depression: A Conversation with Historian Eric Rauchway
Historian Eric Rauchway compares the Great Depression and our current pandemic-induced economic decline, Franklin Roosevelt’s democratic principles, and the role of a competent government in preventing authoritarianism.
-
-
SOURCE: The Atlantic
5/17/2020
The Lessons of the Great Depression
by Lizabeth Cohen
The larger lesson the New Deal offers is that recovery is a complex and painful process that requires the participation of many, not directives from a few. And that, ultimately, we’re all in this together.
-
-
5/17/2020
What Happened to My Future: The Pivotal Years of 1914, 1929, and 2020
by Walter G. Moss
There aren't many comparisons to 2020 as a year when illusions of normalcy and prosperity were shattered.