My teacher, in her typical bizarre way of teaching, has assigned us a poorly disguised history assignment as English.
Thus, I need your help. I am having problems finding sources for what life was for individuals and families in the Depression. I have plenty of information on what was going on in the country, but very little on how a single person’s home life/actions (especially to blacks)/etc. was affected by the culture and problems of the time.
Ideas for books or sites on things like that would be muchly appreciated.
Do you live anywhere near a large public library? They might have issues of local newspapers on microfilm, with handy “human interest” stories from the time.
Though his hyperbolic claims about the novel were not entirely true, As I Lay Dying is nevertheless a masterfully written successor to The Sound and the Fury. As with the earlier work, the novel focuses on a family and is told stream-of-conscious style by different narrators, but rather than an aristocratic family, the focus here is on lower-class farm laborers from southern Yoknapatawpha County, the Bundrens, whose matriarch, Addie, has died and had asked to be buried in Jefferson, “a day’s hard ride away” to the north. The journey to Jefferson is fraught with perils of fire and flood (from the rain-swollen Yoknapatawpha River) as well as the family members’ inner feelings of grief and loss.
I think that this is your teacher’s thinly-veiled attempt to get you to talk to old folks :). If your grandpa doesn’t remember the Depression, you might want to interview some nursing-home or retirement-community residents about it, or other old folks that you know. I’m sure there’s someone out there with stories to tell you. Bring a tape recorder.
You have found that secondary sources of history (history books) don’t always give you a good picture of what was going on in individual lives of the common people in any given time. Primary sources of history, such as newspapers of the time, are better, but what you are looking for is often not written down even there.
I’d second the retirement home/nursing home suggestion. This has the added benefit of getting the old folks someone to talk to and some company, if only for a short time. They’ll love that you’re interested and you’ll be doing them a great favor at the same time.
That sounds like a really cool assignment. As a big proponent of oral history, I’ll echo the suggestion that you try and talk to folks who actually lived it. If that’s not an option, Studs Terkel wrote an absolutely wonderful book, Hard Times, for which he interviewed lots of ordinary people about their experiences and memories of the 1930s. Any public library should have a copy. It’s a great read.
I wrote my law school thesis on share cropping and share tenanting systems in the American south, which certainly did cover that period. Lots of academic interest in individual experiences at that time. I’d suggest heading to the library and running searches on “sharecropping,” “sharecroppers,” “share tenants,” “agricultural labor,” and similar terms and see what comes up.
Also, check university libraries in your area, even if you’re a high school student. Many public universities have generous admission policies. Private colleges and universities may be less cooperative, but one magic phrase to use is “I need access to documents in the government depository.” You see, most large university libraries are depositories, meaning that they get reams and reams of paper from the U.S. government. My understanding is that the library must admit the public to use those documents. And once you’re in the door it’s usually a little tough for them to keep you from the rest of the library. This tactic worked for me at NYU in the mid-90s; if they asked further questions I responded that I was researching agricultural regulations. With eyes glazing over, they’d waive me upstairs.
Try books on the dustbowl. I remember seeing a tv show that talked at length about the trials and tribulations of those sturdy folks who had to operate a dirt farm and sweep a ton of dirt out of the house every day and such. Depressing but very interesting.