Great Depression 
-
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.
-
SOURCE: Marketplace
5/13/2020
What Postwar America Can Tell Us About Today’s Record Unemployment
Economic historians Caroline Fohlin and Gary Richardson discuss the nature of government support for employment to preserve World War II's economic gains.
-
SOURCE: New York Magazine
5/4/2020
Could Trump Go the Way of Herbert Hoover?
Will the ignominious political fate of Herbert Hoover await Donald Trump when voters deliver a verdict on his tumultuous presidency in November?
-
5/3/2020
Youth Crises Past and Present: Learning from the New Deal and Eleanor Roosevelt
by Robert Cohen
It is time to start demanding a successor to the National Youth Administration to meet the educational and economic needs of students--and to ask who in Washington will carry the torch that Eleanor Roosevelt raised during the Depression decade as the champion of low income youth.
-
SOURCE: WBUR
4/9/2020
What The Depression-Era Works Progress Administration Can Teach Us About The Arts During A Crisis
During the Great Depression, art became a part of people's everyday lives, notes art historian Jody Patterson.
-
SOURCE: TIME
4/27/2020
If the Great Depression Is Any Indication, Things Won’t Just Go Back to ‘Normal’ After the Coronavirus Pandemic Ends
by James C. Cobb
New Deal programs had difficulty returning the United States to "normal" life because FDR had difficulty persuading many Americans that the federal government was supporting their economic security. This failure makes a comprehensive response to COVID-19 less politically feasible.
News
- House Panel Advances Bill to Study Slavery Reparations
- House Arrest: How An Automated Algorithm Constrained Congress for a Century
- Hank Aaron’s Name Will Replace a Confederate General’s on an Atlanta School
- How Domestic Labor Became Infrastructure
- ‘That Man Makes Me Crazy’: Neil Matkin's Reign at Collin College Draws Scrutiny
- “Containment and Control, Not Care or Cure”: An Interview with Elizabeth Catte on Virginia’s Eugenics Movement
- How White Fears of ‘Negro Domination’ Kept D.C. Disenfranchised for Decades
- The Sun Never Set on the British Empire’s Oppression
- Sounds of Freedom: The Music of Black Liberation
- How Americans Lost Their Fervor for Freedom (Review of Louis Menand)