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Additional resources for this
issue of History Now
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General Great Depression Resources
Make sure to listen to the Gilder Lehrman Institute's
recent podcasts on this topic:
David M. Kennedy
“Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression
and War, 1929-1945:
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/wp/?p=13
Jonathan Alter and Alan Brinkley
“The Defining Moment: FDR’s First Hundred
Days and the Triumph of Hope”
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/wp/?p=18
Recent histories of the Depression in the United States
include:
Hall, Thomas E., and J. David Ferguson. The Great
Depression: an international disaster of perverse economic
policies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
c1998. A basic account of causes of the Depression.
Himmelberg, Robert F. The Great Depression and
the New. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Part of the Greenwood “Guides” series; basic
but reliable.
McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America,
1929-1941. New York: Times Books, c1993. Reprint
of McElvaine’s acclaimed 1984 book.
Nash, Gerald D. The Crucial Era : the Great Depression
and World War II, 1929-1945. New York : St. Martin's
Press, c1992.
Shlaes, Amity. The Forgotten Man: A New History
of the Great Depression. New York: HarperCollins
Publishers, c2007. Study for the general reader by a
conservative economics columnist.
Watkins, T. H. The Great Depression: America in
the 1930s. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993. Companion
volume to a PBS series. Good for students.
_____. The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of
the Great Depression in America. New York: Henry
Holt & Co., 1999. Watkins’s lengthier and
more scholarly account of the subject by Watkins.
Source materials:
Cohen, Robert, ed. Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: letters
from children of the Great Depression. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, c2002.
Markowitz, Gerald, and David Rosner, eds. Slaves
of the Depression: workers' letters about life on the
job. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.
McElvaine, Robert S. The Depression and New Deal:
A History in Documents. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003. First-rate collection – well designed
for classroom use.
_____. Down & Out in the Great Depression:
Letters from the Forgotten Man. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, c2008. Reprint of McElvaine’s
acclaimed work. Great anthology.
Histories of the Depression in specific regions and
states:
Bremer, William W. Depression Winters: New York
social workers and the New Deal. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1984.
Heinemann, Ronald L. Depression and the New Deal
in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1983.
Mullins, William H. The Depression and the Urban
West Coast, 1929-1933: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle,
and Portland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
c1991.
Robinson, John L. Living Hard: Southern Americans
in the Great Depression. Washington, D.C.: University
Press of America, c1981.
For the experience of farmers before and during the
Depression:
Dubofsky, Melvyn, and Stephen Burwood, eds. Agriculture
during the Great Depression. New York: Garland,
1990.
Hurt, R. Douglas. The Dust Bowl: An Agricultural
And Social History. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981.
_____. Problems of Plenty: The American Farmer
in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,
c2002.
Lookingbill, Brad D. Dust Bowl, USA: Depression
America and the Ecological Imagination, 1929-1941.
Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001.
This is your best bet for understanding the role of
the banking system in the Depression:
Wicker, Elmus. The Banking Panics of the Great
Depression. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1996.
These are useful reference tools:
Ciment, James. Encyclopedia of the Great Depression
and the New. Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe Reference, 2001.
Olson, James S., ed. Historical Dictionary of the
Great Depression, 1929-1940. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 2001.
Internet Resources:
Not surprisingly, American Memory will be invaluable
for you in teaching and learning about the Depression.
I’ve cited many specialized segments for essays
in this issue. For general purposes, look at the Learning
Page for the Depression and World War II and the topics
listed there:
http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/timeline/depwwii/depwar.html
Whatever you do, don’t miss the stunning images
from the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs
division:
http://memory.loc.gov/learn/community/cc_greatdepression_kit.php
And check the lesson plans on this page -- scroll down
to Great Depression/World War II, 1929-1945:
http://memory.loc.gov/learn/lessons/theme.html
Our friends at public television also serve us well.
Your best bet will be the PBS American Experience. Surviving
the Dust Bowl site. You’ll find a good bibliography;
classroom materials are geared to the video; and People
and Events include leading figures of period
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl/peopleevents/index.php
EdSitement has an excellent page on Dust Bowl:
http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=300
The site for “New Deal Network. Franklin and
Eleanor Roosevelt Institute” is still a work in
progress:
http://newdeal.feri.org/
But what they have already is very, very good. Keep
an eye on their growing number of lesson plans and other
classroom aids there:
http://newdeal.feri.org/classrm/index.htm
Go on to see the Photo Library, New Deal Document Library:
http://newdeal.feri.org/texts/default.cfm
Indiana University Southeast has a site for the Great
Depression and the New Deal with a lot – but many
of them are broken or out of date. You’ll have
to persevere:
http://homepages.ius.edu/Special/OralHistory/GreatDepression2.htm
Resources for David M. Kennedy's Overview Essay
You may want to start by reading two of Professor Kennedy’s
books on the Depression and the years that led up to
it:
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression
and War, 1929-1945.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Over Here: The First World War and American Society.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
This collection of essays from a conference at the
Library of Congress illuminates what Calvin Coolidge
did and didn’t do for the American economy:
Klein, Maury. Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929.
Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Recent
study by a business historian.
Leuchtenburg, William Edward. The Perils of Prosperity,
1914-1932 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993. A classic study of the events leading from World
War I to the Depression.
You may find the essays in these volumes provide interesting
sidelights on the economic forces leading to the Depression:
Bernanke, Ben. Essays on the Great Depression.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press: 2004.
Bordo, Michael, et al. The Defining Moment: the
Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth
Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
c1998
These provide background on economic policies and practice
in the Coolidge and Hoover administrations:
Barber, William J. From New Era to New Deal: Herbert
Hoover, the Economists, and American Economic Policy,
1921-1933. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1985.
Haynes, John Earl Haynes, ed. Calvin Coolidge and
the Coolidge era: Essays on the History of the 1920s.
Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, c1998. Papers
given at a conference at the Library of Congress.
For World War II, go to the December 2007 issue of
History Now and my suggestions for resources there:
/historynow/12_2007/index.php
Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Great crash, 1929.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. Reprint of Galbraith’s
renowned work. Still a great introduction for the general
reader.
For World War II, see our December 2007 issue and my
suggested resources there:
/historynow/12_2007/index.php
On the Internet, I’ll urge you, once again, to
look at this American Memory segment--Prosperity and
Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/coolhtml/coolhome.html
and its “Collection Connections” on the
“Learning Page” for suggestions on how to
use materials from this collection in the classroom:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/collections/coolidge/
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