Part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was one indication of the breadth of that program. Governments, including that of the United States, had long been important patrons of the arts, but New Deal support for art was unprecedented in American political life. Like the other New Deal arts projects, the FTP treated creative endeavors as work; it used government funds to hire unemployed actors, stage hands, and playwrights Perhaps best known for its trenchant political satire and innovative presentations, the FTP actually represented a much broader range of activity. Its productions included classics of the dramatic repertoire by such playwrights as Euripides and Shakespeare; foreign-language plays; and contemporary dramas. In an interview done in 1978 by Elizabeth C. Stevens, Milton Meltzer remembered the vibrant, creative energy along with the political controversies that he witnessed during his stint as a publicist for the New York unit of the FTP.

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. They first came to be valued by northern white audiences in the late-19th century. Later, folklorists began collecting (and eventually recording) traditional southern music. John and Alan Lomax recorded southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. They recorded "Long John," a work song, sung by a man identified as "Lightning" and a group of his fellow black convicts at Darrington State Prison Farm in Texas in 1934. Black prisoners working in gangs to break rocks and clear swamps relied on the repeated rhythms and chants of work songs (originating in the forced gang labor of slavery) to set the pace for their collective labor. "Long John" mixed religious and secular concerns, including the notion of successful escape from bondage, a deeply felt desire of both slaves and prisoners.

The surprise attack on December 7, 1941, on U.S. military forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by the Japanese air force was quickly followed by a string of dazzling Japanese military forays. This Japanese "blitzkrieg" captured tens of thousands of Allied military personnel and civilians. Many were subjected to extraordinarily cruel treatment at the hands of the Japanese victors. One of the first and most important of these battles took place at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, which U.S. marines invaded in August 1942. The Japanese forces on Guadalcanal managed to hold on to the island for five months, despite savage battles with the marines and a withering U.S. naval bombardment and blockade. Finally, as a simple poem by noncommissioned officer Yoshida Kashichi expressed, the Japanese forces were starved into submission, retreating from Guadalcanal in disarray on December 31, 1942.

America fought World War II to preserve freedom and democracy, yet that same war featured the greatest suppression of civil liberties in the nation's history. In an atmosphere of hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. One of the most important of the legal challenges to the internment policy was Korematsu v. United States, a case brought by Fred T. Korematsu, a Nisei (an American-born person whose parents were born in Japan). Korematsu had been arrested by the FBI for failing to report for relocation and was convicted in federal court in September 1942. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a sharply divided 6-3 decision, upheld Korematsu's conviction in late 1944. The majority opinion, written by Justice Hugo Black, rejected the plaintiff's discrimination argument and upheld the government's right to relocate citizens in the face of wartime emergency.

The 1936 presidential election proved a decisive battle, not only in shaping the nation's political future but for the future of opinion polling. The Literary Digest, the venerable magazine founded in 1890, had correctly predicted the outcomes of the 1916, 1920, 1924, 1928, and 1932 elections by conducting polls. These polls were a lucrative venture for the magazine: readers liked them; newspapers played them up; and each "ballot" included a subscription blank. The 1936 postal card poll claimed to have asked one forth of the nation's voters which candidate they intended to vote for. In Literary Digest 's October 31 issue, based on more than 2,000,000 returned post cards, it issued its prediction: Republican presidential candidate Alfred Landon would win 57 percent of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes.

Students pair Dorothea Lange's photographs with passages from John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. Students create an oral group presentation and discuss the relationship between the images and text.

The southern textile mills, which had expanded dramatically during World War I, faced serious decline in the 1920s. New tariffs, the growth of textile manufacturing in other parts of the world and the shorter skirt lengths of the 1920s, which required less fabric, exacerbated the problems brought on by wartime overexpansion. Textile manufacturers responded by trying to cut wages and increase workloads. Nevertheless, textile workers often look back at the 1920s with genuine affection and nostalgia. In this 1979 interview with historian James Leloudis, Edna Y. Hargett, a former textile worker, described the closeness of the mill village and the "love offering": a collection for sick workers to replace lost wages in an era when there was no sick leave.

Some may think of farmers as conservative, but that view ignores a long tradition of rural radicalism in the United States. In the early years of the Great Depression, that radicalism found powerful expression in the subverting of farm foreclosures and tax sales. The technique was simple--when a farm was foreclosed for overdue taxes or failure to meet mortgage payments, neighbors would show up at the auction and intimidate any potential buyers. Then the farm and equipment would be purchased at a token price and returned to the original owner. Nation magazine reporter Ferner Nuhn witnessed such an auction sale in Iowa and described this practice in March 1933. These efforts saved the livelihood of many South Dakota and Iowa farmers who were devastated by the depression, but they were not enough. Between 1930 and 1935, about 750,000 farms were lost through foreclosure and bankruptcy sales.

New Deal arts projects were guided by two novel assumptions: artists were workers and art was cultural labor worthy of government support. That commitment was demonstrated most dramatically in the Federal Art Project (FAP), a relief program for depression-era artists. Some painters and sculptors continued working in their studios with the assistance of relief checks--their work was placed in libraries, schools, and other public buildings. Others lent their talents to community art centers that made art training and appreciation accessible to wider audiences. FAP also sponsored the Index of American Design, which set out to discover what was "American" in decorative arts: several hundred artists produced illustrations of thousands of objects in museums and private collections, a source that remains invaluable for historians of American art, society, and culture. In essays written as part of the New Deal's documentation of its own efforts, two editors of the Index of American Design explained the exhaustive search for a distinctive American art in the artifacts of everyday use and decoration.

In October 1933 Chicana dressmakers in Los Angeles launched a citywide strike against the sweatshop conditions under which they toiled. An interview with Anita Andrade Castro, a young dressmaker who went on to become a longtime union activist, provided glimpses of the experience of the rank-and-file strikers. In two excerpts from a long interview done in 1972 by historian Sherna Gluck for the Feminist History Research Project, Castro described, first, her initiation into the union and, second, her arrest as a striker, her anxieties about the impact on her desire to become a citizen, and her encounter with a prostitute.

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.

When members of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) decided to strike the "Little Steel" companies in May 1937, they could hardly have expected it to result in a massacre. On the afternoon of Memorial Day, a flag-waving, ethnically diverse group set out for the company's Republic Steel's main gate but were stopped by a large contingent of policemen. When one of the policemen suddenly and inexplicably fired his revolver into the front of the crowd the march turned into a massacre. In the end, Chicago's police killed ten fleeing workers, wounded thirty more and beat fifty-five so badly they required hospitalization. Lupe Marshall, a housewife and volunteer social worker in South Chicago was among those beaten. She gave this testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, known informally as the La Follette Committee for its chair, Senator Robert La Follette, and charged with investigating the incident.

This assessment gauges students' knowledge of the past. Rather than measure whether students can simply recall decontextualized facts, this assessment requires students to make connections across time and construct an argument about how events are connected. Students with a strong sense of the past will be able to explain that the Great Depression intensified anti-immigrant scapegoating like that included in this letter or that McClatchy wrote to Congress about how to solve the “problem of unemployment” because the unemployment rate was very high during the Great Depression. Strong students will also be able to connect the xenophobia and racism against Mexicans conveyed in the letter with Mexican Repatriation.

Not all farm families who became migrants during the Great Depression did so because of drought, and not all went to California. Many families lost their land when agricultural prices dropped, and the mechanization of agriculture left many agricultural laborers without work. These members of a South Texas family, photographed by the Farm Security Administration's Dorothea Lange in August 1936, were traveling to the Arkansas Delta to pick cotton.

America fought World War II to preserve freedom and democracy, yet that same war featured the greatest suppression of civil liberties in the nation's history. In an atmosphere of hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. On March 18, 1942, Roosevelt authorized the establishment of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to govern these detention camps. He chose as its first head Milton Eisenhower, a New Deal bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture and brother of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In a 1942 film entitled Japanese Relocation, produced by the Office of War Information, Eisenhower offered the U.S. government's rationale for the relocation of Japanese-American citizens. He claimed that the Japanese "cheerfully" participated in the relocation process, a statement belied by all contemporary and subsequent accounts of the 1942 events.

From the site:
Developed for use in middle and high school classrooms, Mission US engages students in the study of transformational moments in American history. Each mission consists of an interactive game and a set of curriculum materials that are aligned to national standards and feature document-based activities. The game immerses players in rich, historical settings and then empowers them to make choices that illuminate how ordinary people experienced the past. The Educator's Guide provides a wealth of resources and activities for both teachers and students, including primary source documents that show the broader social, political, and economic context of events and perspectives featured in the game.

Silicosis, a deadly lung disease caused when workers inhale fine particles of silica dust—a mineral found in sand, quartz, and granite—became a national cause célèbre during the Great Depression when it was recognized as a significant disease among lead, zinc, and silver miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers. In 1938 the federal government declared silicosis America's number one industrial health problem and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins convened a National Silicosis Conference in Washington, D.C. Despite such attempts to deal with the silicosis crisis, workers continued to complain of their plight. Hundreds of letters were sent to federal officials from across the country. The three letters included here (sent to Secretary Perkins) attested to workers' desperation and to their confidence that the government would agree to investigate.

Overview / Description: This unit will examine the experience of Native Americans during the Great Depression in the United States. It will integrate comparisons with the experiences of other minority groups as well as exposing students to primary source documents related to the government policies which were adopted toward Native Americans during the time. Guiding Questions: What were the US government’s policies toward Native Americans leading up to the Great Depression? Were they fair? What was FDR’s response to the struggles of Native Americans during the Great Depression? What was the Native American experience like during the Great Depression and how did it compare to other minority groups? Learning goals/objectives:    Analyze primary and secondary sources related to the experience of Native Americans during the Great Depression. Summarize the experiences of Native Americans during the Great Depression. 

This collection uses primary sources to explore the New Deal. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

Many Americans blamed themselves for their troubles during the early years of the Great Depression. Middle-income workers, while financially better prepared for the economic hard times than were most workers, were psychologically vulnerable and often felt shame at even modest economic setbacks. With men out of work and deeply depressed, women also found it difficult to keep going. Mama