Make connections between Dorothea Lange's images and the history of the Dust Bowl, the Depression, World War II, and large-scale agriculture in the United States. Students learn about the role of photography in news stories and write their own news story.

Beginning on June 17, 1942, Yank, the weekly magazine published by the U.S. Army, began its unprecedented worldwide publishing effort. Most of its 127-member staff of editors, reporters, photographers, artists, and cartoonists rotated from desk jobs in Yank 's main New York office to cover the war overseas and produce twenty-one separate weekly editions. The New York office published the American edition distributed to army camps in the United States and prepared basic material for Yank 's overseas operations in London, Sydney, Honolulu, Rome, Paris, Cairo, Tehran, Calcutta, Puerto Rico, and Panama. Sold for five cents, Yank reached a combined circulation of two million soldiers. The August 6, 1943, American edition of Yank, excerpted here, appeared twenty months after the United States entered the conflict, when the outcome of the war was still in doubt. It presented Yank 's typical miscellany of news, stories, poetry, cartoons, illustrations, photographs, notices, advice, and gripes about enlisted life in the wartime army.

Urban reformers in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had long pointed with horror to the unsanitary and inadequate conditions in which millions of Americans lived, particularly in large cities. But it took the severe economic crisis of the Great Depression to force the federal government to intervene directly in the housing market, and even then the response was often only half-hearted. In the 1930s, access to public housing was highly desirable, and early residents preferred their new homes, which offered bright and well-appointed alternatives to their previous substandard residences. The sharpest criticisms of public housing, however, came from builders and realtors who feared competition and argued that public housing was too appealing and would decrease home ownership. The most influential of the anti-public housing lobbies was the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB). In this 1935 report to the board, NAREB president Walter S. Schmidt argued against public housing on economic and ideological grounds.

In 1933, newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt announced a "Good Neighbor Policy" that promised a more friendly and less interventionist policy toward Latin America. The policy was prompted as much by Latin American resistance to U.S. intervention as by the U.S. government's benevolence. In 1937, the policy was put to the test when Bolivia charged that Standard Oil of New Jersey had defrauded the Bolivian government; Bolivia canceled the company's oil drilling rights and confiscated its facilities. True to its new policy, the United States avoided military intervention and instead pressured Bolivia by withholding loans and technical assistance. The following year, a war of words erupted between the government of Mexico and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey over who owned the rights to exploit a portion of Mexico's oil reserves. After U.S. oil companies refused to accept the arbitration terms of the Mexican labor board, Mexican President Lzaro Crdenas expropriated oil company properties worth an estimated half billion dollars. In The Reply to Mexico, Standard Oil offered a vigorous response to the Mexican expropriation of its property in 1938.

John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers of America, was instrumental in the organizing drive that transformed the coal fields in 1933. He had planned his campaign before the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) became law and even before President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office. (The National Industrial Recovery Act included a provision, section 7(a), that protected workers' right to organize.) In February 1933 (prior to the passage of the NRA), Lewis spoke passionately to the Senate Finance Committee about the need for action to protect workers. In his Senate testimony, Lewis called for emergency action, including allowing workers to unionize and replacing corporate autocracy with union democracy. He warned that if action was not forthcoming, the nation might face grave consequences and promoted unionization as the answer.

John L. Lewis' dramatic walkout from the October 1935 American Federation of Labor (AFL) convention and the creation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (later the Congress of Industrial Organizations) that soon followed marked a new stage in labor's drive to organize industrial unions in depression-era America. Here Alice Dodge Wolfson, who was working as a stenographer in 1935, recalled her own contribution to the Lewis walkout and the creation of the CIO. Attending the October 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City as a delegate from her stenographers local of the United Office and Professional Workers Union (a left-wing New York union aligned with the supporters of industrial unionism around Lewis), Wolfson played a small but decisive role in helping launch the CIO when she rose to challenge an AFL official from the convention floor.

In a total war like World War II, the question "Was everyone doing his or her 'part'?" inevitably arose. Equality of sacrifice took particularly sharp form in the debate over the no-strike pledge for labor unions. Communists, who had played key roles in the union organizing drives of the 1930s and were well represented among union leaders, were intensely patriotic during the war. Their commitment to defeat fascism and defend the Soviet Union, which was threatened by advancing German armies, made Communists among the strongest advocates of labor sacrifices to win the war. A vigorous expression of this point of view can be found in the ballad "UAW-CIO," composed by Baldwin "Butch" Hawes. Hawes was associated with the Almanac Singers--a group that was sympathetic to the Communist position and included such notable figures as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. Folklorists first began collecting traditional southern music in the late-19th century. By the 1920s and 1930s, John and Alan Lomax were recording southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. "Run, Old Jeremiah," sung by Joe Washington Brown and Austin Coleman in Jennings, Louisiana, in 1934, was a ring-shout, a religious song using a West African dance pattern, where the performers shuffled single file, clapping out a complex counter-rhythm. The ring-shout was common during slavery and remained popular well into the 20th century as a means of emotional and physical release during religious worship. The lyrics of the ring-shout spoke of escape from the travails of the present.

By reading primary sources outlining the rights of prisoners of war, along with the primary accounts of American prisoners of war held by the Japanese, students should critically assess the nature of violations committed by the Japanese forces during World War II. Through this assessment, the students should be able to determine the specific ways Japanese forces violated the rights of American POWs. Students should also consider how the Geneva Conventions, and Japan’s lack of ratification, apply to the debates that surrounded Japanese war crimes at the postwar Tokyo Trials.

When nine young black males, one as young as 12, were falsely accused of raping two white women near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931, their case became an international cause celebre largely due to the activism of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Here, the Daily Worker, the CPUSA's newspaper, announces one of the many demonstrations sponsored by the Party in support of the Scottsboro defendants. Despite the efforts of first the CPUSA and later the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a more mainstream civil rights organization, eight of the so called Scottsboro Boys" were convicted and sentenced to death following a trial based on questionable evidence and riddled with prejudice and procedural error. Eventually the death sentences were overturned

Father Charles Coughlin occupied both a strange and a familiar place in American politics during the 1930s. Politically radical, a passionate democrat, he nevertheless was a bigot who freely vented angry, irrational charges and assertions. A Catholic priest, he broadcast weekly radio sermons that by 1930 drew as many as forty-five million listeners. By the mid-1930s, Coughlin's growing extremism, his increasing determination to cast political problems in terms of free-floating conspiracy, and his persistent attacks on a popular president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, made many of his fellow Catholics nervous. John Ryan, a fellow Catholic priest, had long been active as a social reformer and university educator. In a September 1936 radio speech, he denounced Coughlin for his attacks on FDR. Ryan's address provoked a host of letters; these three typical letters to Ryan reflected the character of Coughlin's devoted support and the capitulation to hatred that characterized Coughlin's movement in the late 1930s.

The U.S. government rarely used the word propaganda during World War II when referring to its extensive use of radio, film, newspapers, posters, and leaflets to bolster public support for the war effort. It preferred, instead, terms like "education and information," "psychological warfare," or "morale building." Under whatever rubric, U.S. government media production during World War II was a massive and expensive undertaking. Politicians, public relations experts, and social scientists increasingly heralded film as the ideal medium for domestic propaganda, especially because of the increasing number of sixteen-millimeter projectors in schools, civic centers, and military training facilities. In a 1942 memo on film and propaganda, Eric Knight, a writer in the U.S. army's Morale Branch, argued that "shaping the mental and moral forces on the home front" was as important as, if not more important than, influencing either enemy or neutral nations.

Huey Long first came to national attention as governor of Louisiana in 1928 and U.S. Senator in 1930. He ruled Louisiana as a virtual dictator, but he also initiated massive public works programs, improved public education and public health, and even established some restrictions on corporate power in the state. While Long was an early supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, by the fall of 1933 the Long-Roosevelt alliance had ruptured, in part over Long's growing interest in running for president. In 1934 Long organized his own, alternative political organization, the Share-Our-Wealth Society, through which he advocated a populist program for redistributing wealth through sharply graduated income and inheritance taxes. As his national recognition (and ambitions) grew, he spoke with increasing frequency to national radio audiences. No politician in this era--except Roosevelt himself and Long's sometime ally, Father Charles Coughlin--used radio as frequently and effectively. In this April 1935 radio address, Long sharply criticized FDR and the New Deal and then sketched out his alternative program.

Who invented the computer? Like many important technological developments, the invention of the computer cannot rightly be attributed to a single person. It is clear, however, that World War II was crucial to the emergence of the electronic digital computer. The first general-purpose electronic computer was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the ENIAC, sponsored by the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and developed at the the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. The leaders of the project were physicist John W. Mauchly and a young electrical engineer, John Presper Eckert. In this interview, done in 1988 by David Allison and Peter Vogt for the Smithsonian Institution, Eckert described how the war provided "the opportunity"and the money to solve "engineering problems, scientific problems in general"that interested them.

Through flashback, L.D.Cox tells how he survived the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis during World War II in this segment from History Detectives.

Father Charles Coughlin occupied both a strange and a familiar place in American politics in the 1930s. Politically radical, a passionate democrat, he nevertheless was a bigot who freely vented angry, irrational charges and assertions. A Catholic priest, he broadcast weekly radio sermons that by 1930 drew as many as forty-five million listeners. Strongly egalitarian, deeply suspicious of elites, a champion of what he saw as the ordinary person's rights, Coughlin frequently and vigorously attacked capitalism, communism, socialism, and dictatorship By the mid-1930s, his talks took on a nasty edge as he combined harsh attacks on Roosevelt as the tool of international Jewish bankers with praise for the fascist leaders Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler. The "Radio Priest's" relentless anti-elitism pushed Roosevelt to sharpen his own critiques of elites, and in that sense Coughlin had a powerful impact on American politics beyond his immediate radio audience. This 1937 sermon, "Twenty Years Ago," reflected much of what made Coughlin popular.

To raise commodity prices during the Great Depression, some midwestern farmers enforced Farm Holidays

In a total war like World War II, the question "Was everyone doing his or her 'part'?" inevitably arose. Immediately following Pearl Harbor, the labor movement made an "unconditional no-strike pledge" to help win the war. In turn, labor won some important concessions from the federal government. Some who believed that labor had given up too much responded with "wildcat" (unauthorized) strikes. Others moved to reconsider the no-strike pledge. In 1942 members of the Michigan CIO endorsed the no-strike pledge, but employer attacks on wages the following year caused them to reevaluate. At the 1943 annual meeting, CIO delegates debated and passed a resolution recommending that "unless the assurances that were made to labor at the time we gave up our right to strike" were honored, the pledge should be nullified. This debate provided a sense of the varying positions that workers took on this difficult issue, including the intensity of feeling that the no-strike pledge aroused.

Rather than call for the creation of federal relief programs, this 1931 advertisement placed by the President's Organization on Unemployment Relief opts for local voluntary charity as a response to the Great Depression. President Herbert Hoover firmly believed that relief was a local responsibility, although even this step, which proved inadequate, went further than pre-World War I presidents, who stood by passively during financial panics. Few Americans expected the government to take drastic action when the Depression struck. Many turned instead to their employers, merchants, churches, landlords, and local banks, as well as to family networks, for assistance. As the Depression and unemployment deepened, however, it became clear that the moral capitalism" of marketplace institutions was drastically inadequate and aggressive government action was needed."

This set of lessons extends over a few days. Students read and annotate Ernie Pyle's "A Long Thin Line of Anguish." Students complete a SAYS/DOES graphic organizer, working on summarizing the text, noticing the choices the author makes about use of details, and describing the choices the author makes regarding the structure of the article.

Students complete a SOAPStone handout, identifying subject, occasion, author, purpose, speaker and tone (SOAPStone is a pre-AP/AP strategy). Students develop claims about why Ernie Pyle makes the writing choices he makes. Students write an informal, free-response style assessment about the impact of Pyle's choices.