Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) Photographs

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Photo, Distribution of clothing at 413 Fairview Avenue, Seattle, Oct. 10, 1934.
Annotation

When President Roosevelt created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) in May of 1933, the nation was in the throes of the Great Depression. Roughly 15 million Americans were unemployed, many of whom had lost both their livelihoods and their life savings. FERA maintained local relief organizations that created work projects for the unemployed, primarily construction and engineering projects. This collection of close to 200 photographs documents the work of FERA in King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, Tacoma, and Bellevue.

The bulk of photographs depict construction projects for roads, bridges, schools, public buildings, and parks. Workers also appear working on sewing machines as well as at relief centers, the blacksmiths' forge, the furniture factory, and the sheet metal workshop. Together, these photographs shed light on not only the development of King County, but also on important general aspects of the New Deal program they sought to document.

Crowley's Ridge State Park [AR]

Description

Located atop the forested hills in northeast Arkansas, Crowley's Ridge State Park occupies the former homestead of Benjamin Crowley, whose family first settled this area. Native log and stone structures, constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, set the mood for this park's rustic warmth.

The site offers occasional recreational and educational events.

Recession, Depression, Hard Times, New Deal: Classroom Resources (updated April 7)

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Detail, Dorothea Lange,  Library of Congress, LC-USF34- 000963-E
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What makes the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt's presidency particularly exciting to teach in history classrooms today? In part, apparent parallels between current events and history. The downward spiral of the Dow Jones, continued news about job layoffs, failures of financial institutions, economic stimulus plans, and executive and legislative initiatives evoke the specter of the 1930s.

The internet is full of classroom resources for teaching about the New Deal—arguably, perhaps more than for any other era. We've highlighted a few below that serve as gateways to this internet wealth and a few that address specific subjects and content.

The Overview

During his first 100 days in office, President Roosevelt set an unprecedented legislative pace, sending 15 requests to Congress for action—all of which Congress passed. How FDR Made the Presidency Matter (The New York Times, January 16, 2009) summarizes Roosevelt's record-breaking legislative achievements. (This article is an entry in The Times 100 Days Blog that offers a historical perspective of the first 100 days in office of five 20th century presidents: Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Blog entries compare their experiences with those of President Obama.)

Don't miss this! The March edition of History Now, a quarterly journal from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, focuses on multi-faceted approaches to learning about and to teaching the Great Depression. In this issue: The Great Depression: An Overview, historian David Kennedy roots the causes of the economic crisis in World War I and discusses the state of the nation during the 1920s, and the New Deal and its effects. Other content areas include lesson plans for elementary through high school including women, the Dust Bowl, migrant farmworkers, popular culture; an exhibit from New York's Lower East Side Tenement Museum; and a variety of additional resources from historians, archivists, and educators.

Annenberg Media's series, America's History in the Making, the film, Film 18, By the People, For the People looks at how a new relationship between individuals and the government arose in the face of plummeting agricultural exports, the stock market crash, and environmental disaster all led to an unprecedented economic depression. Sign up for Video on Demand, a free service of Annenberg Media, in order to access series films.

Teaching with Visual Culture

According to A New Deal for the Arts, an exhibit from the National Archives, during the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s and into the early years of World War II, the Federal government supported the arts in unprecedented ways. For 11 years, between 1933 and 1943, federal tax dollars employed artists, musicians, actors, writers, photographers, and dancers. Never before or since has our government so extensively sponsored the arts. These archival materials explore categories of art—visual artists, writers, filmmakers, for example—and discuss examples and their creators.

Picturing U.S. History: an interactive resource for teaching with visual evidence, is a digital project from City University of New York and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Developed on the premise that visual materials are vital to understanding the American past, Lessons in Looking, a guide to Web resources, forums, essays, reviews, and classroom activities, helps teachers incorporate this visual evidence into their classrooms. In March 2009, George Mason University professor, Barbara Melosh focuses on teaching the Great Depression through photographs, political cartoons, comics, graphics, prints, and posters. A series of thoughtful essays and comments describes, annotates, and contextualizes selected visual works from the 1930s.

Websites

Best History Websites: US History Great Depression may be the gateway motherlode. This briefly annotated list is divided into three sections: Great Depression in the News; General Information; and Lesson Plans, Teacher Guides, Activities and More. Among the helpful resources: Teaching K-12 Economics and Taking Stock in the Past for the Future: Examining the Causes and Effects of the 1929 Stock Market Crash Through News Coverage in The New York Times, a 1999 lesson plan from New York Times Learning Pages.

New Deal Network is an educational guide to the Great Depression of the 1930, sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College/Columbia University and funded in part through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Document Library. The site is both a gateway and a resource center to just about any imaginable resource on The Great Depression, and includes Lesson Plans, K-12. (NHEC's Lesson Plan Reviews evaluates the approach of one of the Network's lesson plans for elementary school, Children's Letter's to Mrs. Roosevelt).

At Edsitement, the lesson plan, Worth a Thousand Words: Depression-Era Photographs, gives guidelines for working with the image library of the New Deal Network.

America in the 1930s, a project, developed by the American Studies Program at the University of Virginia, allows visitors to view the 1930s through films, radio programs, literature, journalism, museums, exhibitions, architecture, art, and other forms of cultural expression. The site itself is best for students in high school and above; however, it contains excellent resources, such as audio of 1930s radio programs, that teachers can use with students of any age. Materials are most easily accessed through the organized Site Index.

The H-net discussion group, H-US1918-45: the New Deal Era and Its Origins offers an extensive cafeteria of Resources for Teaching. It's a gateway to a variety of materials spanning World War I through World War II. Resources include course syllabi for college and university classes (including that of noted 20th century historian, Alan Brinkley) which, in turn, lead to further web-based resources; categorized links to primary source websites, photographs and images, posters, maps, audio files and video from American Memory and History Matters, The Crash, FDR Archives, and more.

The online interactive exhibit, A New Deal for Texas Parks demonstrates local impact of New Deal Programs—in this case, the Civilian Conservation Corps, who constructed the first state parks in Texas. Visitors are invited to flip through the pages of the scrapbook to explore how individuals, communities and landscapes in Texas were impacted by the New Deal Era, to explore primary source materials (including music, oral history videos, and newsreels) and to create a personal scrapbook of materials. The exhibit is thematically organized, and at the beginning of each thematic chapter, a PDF file with questions guides content exploration.

Panic of 1873

Question

What was the economic and social impact of the Panic of 1873?

Textbook Excerpt

Textbooks differ in their treatment of the Panic in significant ways. Most tie the depression to the national political controversies surrounding Reconstruction. Too often, textbooks combine the Panic with the political scandals which rocked the Grant administration. While certainly a source of the political crisis facing Republicans in the 1870s, the roots of the Panic run far deeper than merely Grant’s poor political skills.

Source Excerpt

Limited by the amount of gold held in the U.S. Treasury, access to currency and credit contracted sharply, interest rates skyrocketed, and investors were forced to pay off their high stakes gambles (made with cheap paper dollars) with hard-earned gold. Sources bring to light the integral nature of bimetallist theory and its effect on the economy rather than the political climate and scandal that surrounded the Federal Government.

Historian Excerpt

The Panic of 1873 stands as the first global depression brought about by industrial capitalism. It began a regular pattern of boom and bust cycles that distinguish our current economic system and which continue to this day. While the first of many such market “corrections,” the effects of the downturn were severe and, in 1873, unexpected. In 1873 modern economic adjustments were unknown and the ability of national authorities to control the money supply was immature. As a result, the Panic of 1873 led to the longest recorded economic downturn in modern history.

Abstract

Most Americans are familiar with the Great Depression, beginning in 1929, and the economic safety nets established in response to the crisis, such as Social Security and the right to collective bargaining, from 1933 to 1938. Some know of the equally dire economic conditions, starting in 1893, and how this spurred federal progressives like Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson to strengthen public oversight of corporate trusts, child labor, banking, monetary policy, and tariffs. Yet almost no one knows of the profound economic collapse that struck the United States following the Civil War or its equally substantial effect upon the social and political trajectory of the nation. The Panic of 1873 began in Europe, but quickly spread to the United States producing 65 months of depressed economic conditions.

Home Sales During the Great Depression

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Home sales ad from pre-World War Two
Question

How can I find out about the number of home sales per year during the Great Depression?

Answer

Plenty of information about the housing market during the Depression has been collected and is easily available. Some of it is online and some of it is contained in Depression-era government publications. Nevertheless, statistics on the number of U.S. home sales during that time are not easily available, at least in a comprehensive, aggregated form.

Sales Figures, Then and Now

Nowadays, the housing market is primarily tracked through three reports:

  • Existing-home sales: The National Association of Realtors (NAR) collects and reports these figures. Existing-home sales typically comprise 85 percent of transactions, although recently they have been at 90 percent). The NAR reports are available online.
  • New-home sales: The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) collect and report these figures. New-home sales typically comprise 15 percent of housing transactions. These reports are also available online.

These first two reports describe housing sales, which is a demand-side indicator of the market.

  • Housing starts: The supply-side indicator is reflected in the number of housing units begun (foundations started or building permits issued). The U.S. Census Bureau and HUD provide these figures online.
Comprehensive data collection about housing developed in stages.

Some figures on housing construction and on numbers and values of mortgages are available as far back as the Depression, but not comprehensively (the Census Bureau, for example, did not start collecting data on single family housing starts until 1959). Walter Molony of the Public Affairs Office of the National Association of Realtors points out that NAR did not begin data collection on existing-home sales until 1968 and that collection of data on new-home sales by the U.S. Census Bureau did not begin until 1963. Consequently, national figures on housing sales, comparable to those available about today's housing market, do not exist for the period of the Great Depression. However, local real estate boards and chambers of commerce sometimes collected this information locally or regionally even as far back as the Depression, so, depending on your area of interest, you might check there.

Other Housing Market Statistics from the Depression Era

The Census Bureau also makes available figures on housing vacancies and, from 1900, rates of homeownership (based on federal census figures) online. The homeownership rate declined from 1900 to 1920. During the 1920s, it increased, but then during the Depression it dropped again, and was at about 44 percent (percentage of heads of households who owned their homes) by 1940. After World War II, the rate increased dramatically, recently approaching 70 percent.

The housing market in the 1930s was fundamentally different than it is today.

Economist Robert Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 2000), provides data on home prices since 1890 (in 10-year intervals), online and downloadable as an Excel file.

This data, however, was constructed, rather than collected, and, while valuable, is, as Walter Molony of NAR puts it, "academic speculation based on assumptions and modeling using sources such as the value of the dollar, or the average price of newspaper listings in Washington, D.C."

Evolution of the Housing Market

The housing market in the 1930s was fundamentally different than it is today. During the Depression, the federal government became a significant actor in the housing market (as it did in other sectors of the economy). The National Housing Act of 1934 encouraged buyer-friendly mortgages: Before this, mortgages were typically 10-year loans with 50 percent downpayments. The Federal Housing Administration and its FHA-insured loans also increased the availability of mortgages.

After World War II, the G.I. Bill (the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944) increased the availability of 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. Realtors think of this as the beginning of the modern real estate era. The government began to act in the housing market through Fannie Mae (the Federal National Mortgage Association, established in 1938 as part of the New Deal) and, since 1968, Freddie Mac (the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation). Their role in the housing market, to put it very briefly, has evolved over time.

During the Depression, the federal government also intervened in the housing market by eventually dominating home building itself, both public housing and then, in the defense build-up toward the end of the 1930s, "war housing" units in areas near military bases and industrial plants. Privately funded housing construction fell by 80 percent between 1929 and 1933, and the federal government expanded its role in housing construction.

Because of this role, the government collected data on the construction of housing units. It also tracked assumed mortgages because of its involvement in insuring loans. These figures can be found in the Housing Yearbook, published annually from 1935 to 1944 by the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, with sections written by the heads of the government housing agencies who described how they implemented government housing policies and the challenges they faced.

For more information

A good place to find statistics and tables on the U.S. housing market during the Depression, as well as a discussion of the underlying nature of that market and how it has changed over time, is the U.S. Commerce Department's five-volume Historical Statistics of the United States. The Millennial Edition is available online and is fully searchable and downloadable.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself

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FDR delivers his 1st inaugural address
Question

Where did the line in FDR’s First Inaugural Address, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” come from? Did he write it?

Answer

Columbia University professor Raymond Moly wrote most of Roosevelt’s speech, and talked over his initial drafts with the president-elect. Several days before the inauguration, Moly delivered a typescript of his final draft to Roosevelt, who was staying at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. Roosevelt went over the speech then with Moly and copied it out in longhand. The line about “fear itself” was not in the speech at that point. Before leaving FDR’s hotel suite, Moly burned his typewritten draft in the fireplace.

Louis Howe

The next day, former newspaperman and Roosevelt’s long-time close confidante, Louis McHenry Howe, arrived in Washington. According to Howe’s assistant Lela Stiles, a few days previously, Howe had talked with a newspaperman and friend about difficulties that the country faced, and during the conversation Howe told his friend, “I don’t care what else Franklin says in his inaugural address as long as he tells the people that the only thing they have to fear is fear.”

When Howe arrived in Washington, FDR gave him his handwritten draft of the speech. Howe made his own changes and additions and had a secretary type a new draft. One of Howe’s changes had been to add the line, “So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes the needed effort to bring about prosperity once again.” FDR liked Howe’s addition, but then, on the draft, changed the end of the sentence, from “to bring about prosperity once again” to “needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” These were the words he used when he delivered the speech several days later at the inauguration, on March 4, 1933.

FDR liked Howe’s addition, but then, on the draft, changed the end of the sentence.
The Health of the Nation, the Health of FDR

Roosevelt’s revision of Howe’s sentence was in keeping with the revisions that he and Moly had made to earlier drafts. One of the guiding metaphors in the first versions of the speech had turned on comparing the country’s economic condition to a sickness, but Moly had ultimately decided that Roosevelt would be better able to inspire the nation to profound and wide-ranging action if he did not compare it to an invalid, but rather to an army preparing for war. The imagery of sickness in the early drafts yielded therefore to martial language in the last drafts. FDR’s change of Howe’s sentence followed along with this.

Nevertheless, the new version of the sentence still refers to fear and a rejection of being "paralyzed." Whatever else FDR conveyed to his listeners with this sentence, a message of reassurance about his own health was surely part of what they heard. Concerns about whether his polio had incapacitated him had sometimes surfaced during the election campaign and two weeks before the inauguration he had avoided the bullets of a would-be assassin.

Frances Perkins, who served as FDR’s Secretary of Labor, reminisced in 1946, more than a decade after the speech, about Roosevelt coming to terms with his having contracted polio in 1921. She wrote, “He learned in that period and began to express firm belief that the ‘only thing to fear is fear itself.’ He never displayed the slightest bitterness over his misfortune.” Perkins was a little unclear here about whether she was referring specifically to Roosevelt in the decade before he became president, and whether she really meant to place the exact phrase “the only thing to fear is fear itself” in his mouth during that time.

Henry David Thoreau?

If Roosevelt had in fact often expressed those words, it is difficult to understand why his closest colleagues and even his wife Eleanor did not assume that he had thought them up himself and inserted them into the inaugural address, but looked elsewhere for the ultimate source of the expression. When FDR’s associate and sometimes-speechwriter Samuel Rosenman asked Eleanor about the expression, she ventured that her husband may have found something very much like it in a volume of Henry David Thoreau’s writings, which she thought he must have had with him in his hotel suite in Washington.

Thoreau had written the sentence, “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear,” in his journal entry for September 7, 1851, in passing, as part of his comment on his contemporaries’ criticisms of Harriet Martineau’s arguments for atheism in her just-published Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development. Ralph Waldo Emerson later quoted his young friend approvingly, and the phrase was indeed included in later collections of Thoreau’s writings.

Newspaper Ad?

Professor Moly, however, pointed directly at Louis Howe as the proximate source, and doubted that Howe—whose reading habits focused on detective novels—had found the Thoreau quote. He later told William Safire, “I do clearly remember that the phrase appeared in a department store’s newspaper advertisement some time earlier in February. I assume that Howe, an inveterate newspaper reader, saw it too. …" To Howe’s everlasting credit, he realized that the expression fully fitted the occasion.”

"To Howe’s everlasting credit, he realized that the expression fully fitted the occasion."

Moly's reference to department store advertisements sounds like the campaign used by Wanamaker’s. During the first few months of 1933, Wanamaker’s department store placed large display ads in The New York Times. The ads included a small box with inspirational messages of business and commercial platitudes or sentiments “from the founder’s writings,” those of John Wanamaker, who sometimes quoted people like Benjamin Franklin or George Washington. I do not see any of ads for the first two months of 1933 in which Wanamaker quoted Thoreau or anyone else expressing precisely the statement about “fear itself,” nor do I see a quote of Wanamaker venturing the phrase himself. However there are many platitudes there about confidence, cheerfulness, a positive attitude, persistence, honesty, and integrity. Perhaps Professor Moly saw an ad that I have been unable to locate.

Diagnosing the Health of the Nation's Businesses

The phrase “The only thing to fear is fear” did have some currency at the time among businessmen. Julius Barnes, the Chairman of the Board of the National Chamber of Commerce, for example, gave a news conference in early February announcing the organization’s effort to promote efforts to stabilize business suffering during the depression. The conference was reported by The New York Times on February 9. One of the subheadings of the article was “Fears Most Fear Itself,” and quoted Barnes as saying, “In a condition of this kind, the thing to be feared most is fear itself. Confidence, tempered with prudence, is necessary to the operation of even the most perfect business mechanism. The retarding effect of a sense of insecurity is promptly communicated from worker to consumer, from consumer to producer and the whole machine stalls, and the anticipated evil becomes.”

Many in the business community were in fact convinced that the country was suffering from a kind of psychic sickness, caused not by systemic problems in industry or banking, but by the nation’s irrational lapse into fear, which had caused an economic paralysis. It was the fear itself that needed to be exorcised. FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, also often spoke in this way.

By this metaphor, the nation was an invalid who had been afflicted with a mental problem, a paralysis of action. Its thinking somehow had to be turned around, toward a positive confidence. By changing the patient’s thinking, his body would naturally recover his mobility. The nation needed a mental healer.

The nation needed a mental healer.
New Thought

This sounds rather like the frame of reference of the quasi-religious “New Thought” or “Mind-Cure” or “Mental Science” Movement that blossomed in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As William James described it in his 1929 work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, “The leaders of this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.” The movement was defined not so much by an organizational form as by the common assumptions and themes of a group of writers who specialties included what we would today called “alternative medicine,” speculative psychology, and inspirational literature. Their writings are dominated by perorations on healing and success. The business community, then as now, had a fondness for “motivational” speaking and writing, especially as it might make a sales force more effective. It is likely not an accident, therefore, that the head of the Chamber of Commerce would be diagnosing the chief of the nation’s problems as fear.

In fact, the precise phrase, “The only thing to fear is fear,” occurs in the 1908 book, Thought Vibration; or, the law of attraction in the thought world, written by New Thought writer William Walker Atkinson. He counseled, “Remember, the only thing to fear is Fear, and—well, don’t even fear Fear, for he’s a cowardly chap at the best, who will run if you show a brave front.” In 1918, Atkinson wrote The Power of Concentration under the pseudonym of Theron Q. Dumont, in which he declared, “There is no justification for the loss of courage. The evils by which you will almost certainly be overwhelmed without it are far greater than those which courage will help you to meet and overcome. Right, then, must be the moralist who says that the only thing to fear is fear.”

Another “New Thought” writer, the “naturopathic doctor,” Henry Lindlahr, wrote in his 1919 book, Practice of Natural Therapeutics, “Avoid fear in all its forms of expression; it is responsible for the greater part of human suffering. The only thing to fear is fear.”

Businesses had invoked these precise sentiments around the time they were published, during the domestic economic pinch prevalent during World War I, for example. On the 4th of July, 1917, the musical instrument firm of Edward Droop and Sons in Washington, D.C., paid for a large display ad in The Washington Post, under the large headline, “The Only Thing to Fear Is Fear.” The firm’s ad continued:

We refuse to be perturbed by the alarmists, the pessimists and by the timid who see things at night. As prophets in the past they have a batting average of about .001. The only times they have hit the truth is when they themselves created the conditions they feared by fearing them. Our slogan during these earnest times is “Keep Business Going.” We shall retrench in nothing, cancel nothing, fear nothing. Our faith in the existing and eternal prosperity of the United States of America is immovable. … We believe that this is the very time of all times that you should buy what you want—whether it be in our line or in any other. The only way to stop your business is to stop the other fellow’s. The only thing to fear is fear.

The phrase “The only thing to fear is fear” and its variants, therefore, were demonstrably “out there” in circulation within the business community during the first few decades of the 20th century. William Safire makes the point that it does not really matter where the phrase came from because it was FDR that used it during his speech to inspire the nation and it was he, therefore, who transmuted the linguistic coin into rhetorical gold.

For more information

Text and audio of FDR's First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933, at History Matters.

Bibliography

William Walker Atkinson, Thought Vibration: or, The law of attraction in the thought world, Chicago: The Library Shelf, 1908, pp. 46-49.

“Business to Make Stabilization Study: National Commerce Chamber Is Forming Committee to Work Out Formal Program,” New York Times, February 9, 1931, p. 3.

Theron Q. Dumont (William Walker Atkinson), The Power of Concentration. Chicago: Advanced Thought Publishing Company, 1918.

Davis W. Houck, FDR and Fear Itself: The First Inaugural Address. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002, pp. 119-120.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: 1929, p. 93.

Henry Lindlahr, Practice of Natural Therapeutics. Chicago: The Lindlahr publishing company, 1919, p. 447.

“The Only Thing to Fear Is Fear,” Display ad for E. F. Droop & Sons, Company, Washington Post, July 4, 1917, p. 2.

Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew. New York: Viking Press, 1946, p. 29.

William Safire, “Nothing to fear but fear itself,” Safire’s Political Dictionary, rev. edition. Oxford: University Press, 2008, pp. 481-483.

Lela Stiles, The Man Behind Roosevelt: The Story of Louis McHenry Howe. New York: The World Publishing Company, 1954, p. 235.

“The Value of a Silver Tongue,” Bankers’ Magazine (May 1927): 666.

Interactive Exhibit from the American Art Museum

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Ross Dickinson, Valley Farms, 1934,  Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Earlier in April, we highlighted a few resources for teaching about the New Deal, but here's one addition well worth checking out.

An exhibition, 1934: A New Deal for Artists, is on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery until January 2010, and a multifaceted, online educational website complements this display.

It was the first time the United States government provided direct support to artists.

Curator Elizabeth Broun explains The Public Works of Art Project of the New Deal. "Artists were encouraged to portray 'the American Scene.' With this minimal guidance, they turned to local and regional subjects and created a picture of the country striving to survive through hard work and true grit. They were inspired by the idea that their art would be displayed in public spaces for broad audiences." It was the first time the United States government provided direct support to artists.

The website encourages visitor immersion in the works of art—regional, recognizable subjects—ranging from portraits to cityscapes and images of city life to landscapes and depictions of rural life. The 1934 artists reminded the public of quintessential American values such as hard work, community, and optimism.

An Exhibition Slide Show is open to public comments and shared stories.

A flash presentation takes visitors into a virtual movie theater where virtual curators talk about picturing the 1930s, provide historical context, explanations of individual paintings, and the chance to create movies with personal collections. Movies are created using Digital Storyteller created by primaryaccess.org. (Be forewarned: navigation is a little complex in this component, but well-worth the exploratory effort. It's a good idea to visit How is This Site Organized.)

Mapping 1934 lets visitors see where the exhibition's artworks were painted.

The museum has also created a 1934 Flickr group to share the nearly 400 related artworks and objects from its collection. New images are added each week both by the museum and members of the public who choose to join the group. Comments, stories, and new images are invited and welcome.

The Great Depression and Today

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 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C
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The anniversary of the October stock market crash of 1929 approaches, and many are comparing the current financial crisis to the beginning of the Great Depression. Here are some classroom resources for teaching about economic issues and commentary by historians on similarities and differences between 1929 and now.

Annenberg Media's Learner.org offers teacher resources to guide classroom discussion. Economics U$A looks at critical issues in U.S. economics, with programs including The Banking System, The Federal Reserve, Stabilization Policy, Exchange Rates. The program "Reducing Poverty" looks at policies enacted under FDR during The Great Depression. Inside the Global Economics looks at vivid examples around the world, from hyperinflation in Argentina to petrodollar recycling in the 1970s to "shock therapy" in Poland.

The Economics Classroom: A Workshop for Grade 9-12 Teachers includes programs relevant to the current crisis such as The Government's Hand and The Building Blocks of Macroeconomics.

In The Real Great Depression published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 19th-century historian Scott Reynolds Nelson explains why the global Depression of 1873 offers a better historic parallel for the current financial crisis than does the crash of 1929.

Rutgers Professor James Livingston writes in The Great Depression and Ours: Part I at the History News Network that the present economic crisis and the Great Depression are comparable "not because they resulted from similar macroeconomic causes but because the severity of the credit freeze in both moments is equally great, and the scope of the financial solution must, then, be equally far-reaching." He discusses causal factors of both.

On The New York Times Video Reports an economic reporter and the Chief Financial Correspondent talk about the roots of the crisis and compare it to the Great Depression. Their conversation, Echoes of a Dismal Past explores whether the government has learned the lessons of the 1930s. Financial Crisis Hits Teens goes to Elisabeth Irwin High School in downtown Manhattan to see how the nation's financial crisis is trickling down to teenagers. The three-and-half minute video offers a good starting point for economics, history, and social studies classroom discussion.