Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Great depression immigrant workers
Farm life in the 1930s
Farm life in the 1930s
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Great depression immigrant workers
Documenting the Depression:
The FSA photographers and Rural Poverty
The Great Depression fell hard in the year of 1935 bringing what seemed to some people the end of the world. But in truth, the Great Depression was nothing near the end of the world, in fact the year of 1935 was not the first year nor was it the last year that many families had suffered and went hungry due to lack of work. Families forced to leave their home. Children going in hunger while their bellies pierced with pain. Mothers trying desperately to keep the family together while holding the brunt of the problems due to the depression. The husbands feeling the guilt for not having a job and thinking that it is his fault. Children scream with lack of food and sheer boredom as the families pack their bags and head towards California in hopes to find work and the start of a new life. This is a painted picture of what one might have saw during the Great Depression. However, we need not imagine what it might have been like. What pictures might have looked like because we already know.
Photography was a technological advance during the nineteenth century and although not many people had cameras, the ones that did, did not miss the opportunity to capture the cruel times of that period. In John Vachon’s picture taken in 1940, he shows an abandoned farmhouse in Ward County, North Dakota. Vachon also takes a picture of the living quarters of a fruit packing home for the workers in Berrien, Michigan in 1940. The small confinements of the house could barely suit one person let alone a whole family. Dorothea Lang, another photographer of that time shots photos of a migrant mother in Nipomo, California in 1936. Her face stern and wrinkled. A look of sadness and concern appears on her tired face while her two children cling on to her shoulder. She also took a picture of a Mexican migrant workers home in Imperial Valley, California in 1937. His home is merely anymore than a small bedroom. A shack made out of cardboard and what appears to be aluminum. Once again, hardly set for one person let alone a family. These conditions were not anything unusual. Unfortunately, those were the times during the Great Depression and the photographers could not have captured them any better.
The Great Depression ended because of...
... middle of paper ...
..., North Carolina in 1939. That picture was taken by Marion Post Wolcott and it shows the owner neatly pressed wearing a black suit and hat smoking a cigar. Arthur Rothstein took another picture in 1940 that one also depicts an owner of a mule dealer in Creedmoor, North Carolina neatly pressed in a black suit only smoking a cigarette as opposed to a cigar. Those were the people who didn’t care that people were suffering, they didn’t care if they had no home and most of all, they didn’t care if children went hungry. They were in it for they money. So when I look at those pictures and think what the American middle class worker at that time would think, I hatefully have to say that they would not care one way or another. You win some, you lose some.
The Great Depression was a tragic era in history. To sum up the feelings and hard times that people had suffered through would be nearly impossible. But like I stated in the previous pages, the pictures tell no lies. The pictures cannot erase the expression on people’s faces or the appearance that portray. The evidence is in the pictures, it always has been and it will remain to do so until the end of time.
The Great Depression is one of the worst time for America. Books, cartoons, and articles have been written about the people during the Depression and how they survived in that miserable period. For example, the book Bud not Buddy takes place in the time of the Great Depression. Bud is a ten year old orphan, who was on the run trying to find his dad. There are many feelings throughout the book like sadness and scarceness. There are many diverse tones in the book about what people were feeling at the time.
The Great Depression is a sad era in United States History. The Great Depression was a massive economic depression. It affected many people’s lives across the United States. People’s lifestyles changed dramatically going into the Great Depression. There were many factors that caused the Great Depression.
Grant Wood was a Regionalist artist who continually endeavored to capture the idyllic beauty of America’s farmlands. In 1930 he had been roaming through his hometown in Iowa searching for inspiration when he stumbled upon a house that left him spellbound. From this encounter came America’s iconic American Gothic. Not long after Wood’s masterpiece was complete the once ideal countryside and the people who tended to it were overcome by despair and suffering as the Great Depression came to be. It was a time of economic distress that affected nearly every nation. America’s stock market crashed in 1929 and by 1933 millions of Americans were found without work and consequently without adequate food, shelter, and other necessities. In 1935, things took a turn for the worst as severe winds and dust storms destroyed the southern Great Plains in the event that became known as the Dust Bowl. Farmers, who had been able to fall back on their crops during past depressions, were hit especially hard. With no work or way or other source of income, many farms were foreclosed, leaving countless families hungry and homeless. Ben Shahn, a Lithuanian-born man who had a deep passion for social injustice, captures the well-known hopelessness of the Great Depression through his photograph Rural Rehabilitation Client. Shahn and Wood use their art to depict the desperation of everyday farmers in America due to the terrors and adverse repercussions that the Great Depression incited.
The great depression was a very sad and hard time. This was a time where people had little money, no available jobs and just had a hard time with everything. Many people had nd any way to make money whether it was cutting kid’s hair in neighborhood, picking fruit, selling iron cords house to house or even painting a house for 5 dollars. Even though this was a very hard time some people still had hope that things would get better. This was a really bad time until Franklin Roosevelt who was for the government supporting the Americans and not the other way around became president.
The Great Depression, beginning in the last few months of 1929, impacted the vast majority of people nationwide and worldwide. With millions of Americans unemployed and many in danger of losing their homes, they could no longer support their families. Children, if they were lucky, wore torn up ragged clothing to school and those who were not lucky remained without clothes. The food supply was scarce, and bread was the most that families could afford. Households would receive very limited rations of food, or small amounts of money to buy food.
Library of Congress, American Memory Collection, America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945, Interior of shack in hills near Cidra, LC-USF34- 012349-E.
First, the scene in the image was manipulated through stage-managing, a common practice in photojournalism. While the image of the migrant mother, Florence Thompson, appears to the viewer to be a genuine and unprompted look at the hardship and deprivation of a dejected migrant woman. This, of course, was the reality of Ms. Thompson’s personal situation at the time. But the scene itself was micromanaged to appear in a lucid and vivid form in the image, including editing Ms. Thompson’s older children from the image to create the more poignant scene of a mother holding a small child and using a pose in which the woman is looking out into the distance, with the two children told to lo...
Conceivably one of the most copied, iconic depression era images, as well as one of the single most popular stock photo images in the Corbis “Bettman collection” (Parente 2003), “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” neither brought fame nor fortune to the photographer that captured that moment in time that still brings an uneasy sense of acrophobic fear to it’s viewers. Charles Clyde Ebbets, born August 18th, 1905 in Alabama, never knew the popularity that this emblematic representation of the daredevil American steel worker, in the midst of the skyscraper-building boom of depression era New York, would eventually attain.
The Great Depression was felt worldwide, in some countries more than others. During this time, many Americans had to live in poor conditions. In the United States, 25 percent of the workers and 37 percent of all nonfarm workers lost their jobs (Smiley 1). Unemployment rates had increased to 24.9 percent during 1933 (Shmoop 1). Unable to pay mortgages, many families lost their homes.
"FSA Photographers Document the Great Depression." FSA Photographers Document the Great Depression. Web. 12 Feb. 2014.
The Great Depression was one of the greatest challenges that the United States faced during the twentieth century. It sidelined not only the economy of America, but also that of the entire world. The Depression was unlike anything that had been seen before. It was more prolonged and influential than any economic downturn in the history of the United States. The Depression struck fear in the government and the American people because it was so different.
However, for the worst affected, the most difficult effect on morale must have been the lifelong memory of seeing their children and family suffer, and having no power to change this. For the lack of power to change the future is the exact opposite of the ‘American Dream’. References: Prosperity, Depression and The New Deal, Peter Clements, 2001, Hodder and Stoughton, London Letters To The Roosevelts, various authors, date and publisher unknown An Editor Loses His Job In The Great Depression, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, Studs Terkel, 1978, Pantheon Books. Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? , Jay Gorney, 1932, Warner Bros. Music The Great Depression, Mc Elvaine R., 1984, Times Books, New York
The Great Depression is a time in the history of the United States that people have learned and gained knowledge from. Its harsh times and conflicts have been written about in books, seen in movies, talked about on radios, and told to families throughout the generations. Seeing how life was during the 1930s in the movie, The Cinderella Man, was a great eye opener to how the people of this time truly survived and kept their true humanity in times of havoc. The time of the 1930s should be an inspiration to the nation and cause many to do well and live life smart and prosperous.
Many Americans choose to forget the past brutalities of child labor. Unfortunately, the past does not disappear. Child labor did take place in the U.S. and the Carolina Cotton Mill photograph is a prominent witness. Lewis Wickes Hine is the artist behind this powerful photo, which was taken in the early 1900s (Dimock). Hine’s Carolina Cotton Mill embodies the struggle of child labor through the incorporation of situational information, artistic elements such as lines and space, and cultural values.
This photo of a mother, Florence Owens Thompson and her two young children called, Migrant Mother was taken in March of 1936, a date was not given. This photo was taken by a Dorothea Lange, a photographer who wanted to take pictures of all the bad things happening around her during the great depression. After being taken, this photo was then called, migrant mother.” The photo was taken at a pea picking plant in Nipomo, California. Florence allowed Dorothea to take this picture because she thought that it would help to show the difficulties of the working poor. Soon after the photo was taken, it was published in newspapers promoting the government to send food and aid to the people of Nipomo where the living condition were almost unbearable. Later in her life, Florence came to regret that this picture was ever taken because it made her seem very desperate, which is something that she didn’t want to be known as being. The black and white and the expression on the mother's face add