To build broad public support for its New Deal relief programs, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged documentation of the human suffering caused by the Depression. From 1935 to 1943, photographers working for several federal government agencies, principally the Farm Security Administration (FSA), traveled the country and produced the most enduring images of the Great Depression. This Walker Evans picture of a poor rural family was part of that massive documentation effort. Wishing to convey both suffering and dignity, FSA photographers searingly presented conditions to the American public, selecting effective compositions and poses influenced by advertising and mass-market magazine formats. These photographic icons of the era were widely circulated in the popular press, including Time, Look, and Life magazines, and they appeared in major museum exhibits and best-selling books.

An unknown photographer captured this scene of men, women, and children picking cotton under the watchful eye of an overseer. Slaves on cotton plantations worked under harsh conditions. The working day began at dawn and often lasted well into the night. Work was done in gangs, where discipline and the unrelenting pace of work was enforced by a driver or overseer. Whipping was regularly used to enforce picking quotas or increase the pace of work. In what little time they had besides what they spent working for the master, slaves had to do all the chores of daily life: they prepared their own meals, washed and fed their children, cleaned their cabins, washed and mended their clothes, and, if they were especially fortunate, tended their own vegetable gardens.

On the morning of October 24, 1929 ("Black Thursday"), billions of dollars in stock value were wiped out before lunch. Prices recovered somewhat that afternoon, but the Great Crash was underway. The next day President Herbert Hoover counseled reassurance, but as stock prices continued to plummet Hoover's reassurances rang increasingly hollow. The president's efforts to reassure the public did not stop, in part for political reasons. To win reelection in 1932, he would have to convince voters that his policies were bringing recovery. In this excerpt from an October 22, 1932, campaign speech on "The Success of Recovery," Hoover told a partisan crowd of twenty-two thousand in Detroit's Olympia Arena that success would have come even sooner if not for Democratic obstruction. The Detroit faithful and radio audiences heard Hoover hail ten sure signs of "economic recovery." (Less enthusiastic were hundreds of unemployed men who greeted him at the train station with signs like "Hoover--Baloney and Apple Sauce.")

In his essay "Wealth," published in North American Review in 1889, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie argued that individual capitalists were duty bound to play a broader cultural and social role and thus improve the world. Some labor activists sharply differed with Carnegie's point-of-view and responded with essays of their own, such as the Pennsylvania trade unionists who protested Carnegie's gift of a library to the city of New Castle by pointing out that it had been built with the "sweat and blood of thousands of workers." Carnegie's essay, below, later became famous under the title "The Gospel of Wealth." (Click here to hear an audio version of an excerpt from that speech.)

This illustration from an 1855 publication, The Crisis; or, the Enemies of America Unmasked, depicted a labor demonstration in New York's City Hall Park demanding relief for the unemployed during the 1854-55 panic. Both Germans and Irish took part in the demonstration. The Crisis 's presentation of "foreign" labor demonstraters was meant to alarm readers who shared its "nativist," anti-immigrant position. This wood engraving was one of the few images of organized working-class action published before the Civil War.

When the United Automobile Workers won a six week sit-down strike in 1937 against General Motors, the largest corporation in the United States, a fever of organization and a sense of empowerment spread throughout working-class communities in the Northeast and Midwest. That year, 5 million workers took part in some kind of industrial action, and nearly 3 million joined a union. Denys Wortman's cartoon in the March 25, 1937 New York World-Telegram captures the excitement and sense of power felt by many working men and working women when they participated in militant labor action.

Realizing that their best chance of emancipation lay with the British army, as many as 100,000 enslaved African Americans became Loyalists during the War for Independence. They risked possible resale by the British or capture by the Americans, and many became refugees when the British withdrew at the end of the war. Born near Charleston, South Carolina, Boston King fled his owner to join the British. He escaped captivity several times and made his way to New York, the last American port to be evacuated by the British. King was listed in the "Book of Negroes" and issued a certificate of freedom, allowing him to board one of the military transport ships bound for the free black settlements in Nova Scotia. There, King worked as a carpenter and became a Methodist minister. He moved to Sierra Leone in 1792 and published his memoirs, one of a handful of first-person accounts by African-American Loyalist refugees.

We generally think of Puerto Rican migration to the U.S. mainland as largely a post-World War II phenomenon, since more than 800,000 Puerto Ricans came to the United States between 1940 and 1969. But immigration actually started much earlier in the century; between 1915 and 1930 more than 50,000 Puerto Rican migrants headed for the United States--especially New York City. The new immigrants faced a mixed reception, particularly from immigrants from other countries. In this interview for the radio program "Nosotros Trabajamos en la Costura"(We Work in the Garment Industry), garment worker Luisa Lopez told how she faced discrimination from European immigrant workers when she went to work in garment factories in the 1920s. Yet sometimes alliances crossed ethnic lines: Lopez found an ally in an Italian-American socialist.

This lesson teaches students about the importance of entrepreneurship and small businesses in our society. First, use the briefing (found in Task 1) to teach students about this concept. Then, lead the class in discussion. Finally, ask students to research and write about the topic. This lesson is a part of the Business and Marketing Essentials Course Guide. To download it, visit mbastatesconnection.mbaresearch.org and select "Course Guides" under "Curriculum and Instruction."

Huey Long, a senator and former governor of Louisiana, while initially a supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, became one of the most important critics of the New Deal during the Great Depression. To curb the power of the rich, Long proposed the Share Our Wealth Plan" that would redistribute wealth from large fortunes to the needy and enable the government to provide every family with "enough for a home

This December, 1930, edition of the League for Industrial Democracy's The Unemployed satirizes three common business perspectives on the unemployment problem." Diagnoses of the causes of the Great Depression varied

The slave auction was one of the most barbaric practices of the harsh system of slavery. The slave trade within the United States destroyed families and tore apart communities, especially after 1840 when slavery was extended into the newer lands of the lower South and Southwest. Planters in the older settled areas of the upper South could realize substantial profits selling enslaved people, and New Orleans became the center of the trade. The resulting forced migration involved hundreds of thousands of African Americans. Some moved with their masters, but the migration also tore apart slave families residing on different plantations. Others were sold on the block, as Solomon Northrup described in his Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841.

" This course is designed for students seeking a fundamental understanding of Japanese history, politics, culture, and the economy. "Raw Fish 101" (as it is often labeled) combines lectures, seminar discussion, small-team case studies, and Web page construction exercises, all designed to shed light on contemporary Japan."

Between 1800 and 1840, improved transportation networks and larger markets altered the way goods were produced, as workshops and factories became larger and fewer goods were produced by household labor. Another effect of growing industrialization was social stratification, as some master craftsmen became businessmen while their journeymen lost their independence and became wage workers. This illustration from the 1841 novel The Career of Puffer Hopkins caricatured the growing distinction between masters and journeymen. The master tailor's prosperous outfit, stance, and fancy business address (New York's Broadway) sharply contrasted with the journeyman's wretched appearance and workshop-home.

With depression looming as a continual threat to the U.S. economy in the late 19th century, Americans debated how the government should respond to hard times--a question still unanswered today. Manufacturers--then as now--usually took the position that government should not interfere with the workings of the "free market." When J. H. Walker, a shoe manufacturer from Worcester, Massachusetts, testified in 1878 before a congressional committee investigating "the causes of the general depression in labor and business," he argued simply that the government should do nothing at all for the vast army of unemployed. "Leave them alone; that is the remedy," he declared.

Created in 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided hope and employment for millions of unemployed workers and studied the human toll of the depression. One such study--a series of WPA-conducted interviews with Dubuque, Iowa families--found that middle-class Americans particularly felt the sting and shame of unemployment caused by the depression. In this interview, the Donners discussed the closing of their family-owned printing business in Chicago during tough times. Returning to live with Mrs. Donner's family in Dubuque in 1934, Mr. Donner remained unemployed for over a year before landing a job as a timekeeper on a WPA project, earning less than one-third his previous income.

Large factories such as the Lowell textile mills, with their thousands of employees and imposing structures, were the exception in the United States' early industrial development. More commonly, small manufactories sprang up throughout the northeastern United States wherever a fast moving stream was available to provide water power. N. B. Gordon was the general manager as well as the chief mechanic and mill agent at the Union Cotton and Woolen Manufactory, a small textile company in the southeastern Massachusetts town of Mansfield. His work diary chronicled the everyday difficulties he faced in keeping the mill operating, including such problems as broken machines and too little water to power the mill. Highly independent employees caused him headaches, too.

Market to Market is a part of the Iowa Public Television. The website includes videos of feature stories and market analysis by analyst Ted Seifried. In addition, there is Market to Market in the classroom where there are videos on business, technology and science of agriculture.

Railroads were among the earliest U.S. industries to apply modern management principles to their operations. Beginning in the 1850s and 1860s, railroads were the first American businesses to have a large number of salaried managers and an internal organizational structure with clear lines of communication, responsibility, and authority. These managerial innovations, standard by the 1880s, were necessary to control a large number of employees and offices scattered over a vast geographical area. With the growing professionalization of railroad management came a burgeoning professional literature. Marshall M. Kirkman wrote prolifically about railroad management. This excerpt from his multi-volume The Science of Railways: Organization and Forces (1896) extolled the virtues of military-like discipline in the running of American railroads.

Microeconomics will ground you in - surprise - basic microeconomics-how markets function, how to think about allocating scarce resources among competing uses, what profit maximizing behavior means in industries with different numbers of competitors, how technology and trade reshapes the opportunities people face, and so on. We will apply economic ideas to understand current economic problems, including the housing bubble, the current unemployment situation (particularly for high school gradutes), how Google makes its money and why healthcare costs are rising so fast.