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Accessed December 3, Entertainment provided a lifeline for countless Americans throughout the Great Depression. One of the most influential members of the industry was Shirley Temple. Her songs and dances encouraged Americans to keep fighting. Similarly, the Wizard of Oz also plays an important role in relating to Americans during the depression. In the midst of the depression, Dortohy is swept away from hardship to a magical world.
It provided Americans with the opportunity to escape as well. It allowed new artists to thrive on their surroundings and learn how to express the daily lives of those around them, and the conditions they were living in. The lyrics of the songs describe the Depression and the effects it had on communities. The song questions how to keep going when there is not much to go forward to.
The films demonstrate how film represented the times and how people lived. Photos of the Dust Bowl sweeping over the farmlands and Americans heading off to work are firsthand accounts of the Depression. Dorothea Lange photographed countless Americans and settings throughout the Deprerssion, and some of the most recognized photos are her work.
Accessed December 11, Life The video by the US National Archives describes the familiar situation that many families suffered during the Depression. Stories from the Great Depression. Children This book, although geared towards a younger audience, provides great insight into the lives of the children of the Great Depression. Children of the great depression. Letters from children of the great depression.
University of North Carolina Press. Advertising Age 59 Voices from the Dust Bowl. Accessed November 19, Fear, based on the insecurities and despair of an earlier era, leads a certain extra impetus to an examination of the Depression Decade in America. Yet many Americans will recount other emotions evoked by that period—a sense of commitment, a pride in place, and a tradition of sharing. In fact, like all other complex national phenomena, the Great Depression cannot easily be characterized or explained. Rural, often religiously conservative, America saw the Depression as a national punishment for the excessive licentiousness and frivolity of the Roaring Twenties.
The Leftist ideologue rejected the fundamental tenets of American political and economic traditions in favor of Marxist solutions to hopeless economic disintegration. Herbert Hoover symbolized caution and orthodoxy, but Franklin Roosevelt suggested innovation and experiment. Decades later, we may be too smug because we know the Thirties ended happily. Yet one way we can recapture the spirit of the Great Depression is through the history and fiction of the era. The story of the Great Depression, on the other hand, extends far beyond the perspective of any novelist, no matter how great he or she is.
Novels have a timeless aesthetic and psychological resonance in addition to their significance as historical documents.
The novels in this series are extraordinarily well-placed windows from which to observe and understand the impact of the Depression on so many Americans. Novels dramatize the widely diverse ways that people coped with disaster; they can be viewed as fictional therapies for a virulent economic sickness. Some of our writers are made hopeful by a vision of social solidarity among Americans of traditionally antagonistic race and class.
Others see tragedy in the symbolic exhaustion of heroism in figures who in any earlier period would have embodied an inexhaustible American optimism. Whatever the theme and tone of these novels written in the Thirties, they transport their readers into an age of anxiety, struggle, defeat, and despair; yet through it all, the fictional—and the actual—Americans managed to endure. Although events of the Thirties like the stock market crash and the New Deal would seem to be too well known to need systematic recapitulation, we all can use some reminders of the historical period that we call the Great Depression.
Rather, his is an extremely wide-ranging account of the Depression Decade, supplementing the usual reports on economics and politics with the stuff of everyday life—education, literature, the arts, religion, urban development, reform movements, fashions, entertainment, and fads.
He wrote and published Since Yesterday in , less than a year after the period encompassed by the book ended. Allen was probably a better journalist than professional historian—especially in the formal, analytic sense—but Since Yesterday is a triumph of amusing accumulation. Allen wants his regards to America together like a Depression-age craze, the jigsaw puzzle.
He died in , much honored for his work, which sold in large numbers from the date of publication.
Since Yesterday seemed to readers then and now to be a fine starting place. Only a person who had experienced privation and homelessness, despair, and unemployment first hand could write such a novel. One of seven children of a Missouri coalminer, Conroy saw his father and two of his brothers die in the mines. He had a scanty formal education, but he was encouraged by his mother to fulfill his childhood dream of writing.
Conroy found ready acceptance of journals like The New Masses. He is a retired attorney and executive director of a national trade association in the Washington, D. Among his avocations, he is an award-winning author, a silent film collector, pianist, and a collector of historical radio broadcasts from the s. He is regarded as the official biographer of George Arliss, having published five volumes on the subject, and has published over a dozen books in both fiction and non-fiction. Bob lives in Northern Virginia with Maureen, his wife of 43 years.
They have three grown children, and four grandchildren. Are you an author?
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