New Deal Network
newdeal.feri.org

The New Deal Network is an educational guide to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Without question it is the most site on the subject of the Great Depression and the New Deal. It is sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College, Columbia University. This is a portal or "Meta" site to many aspects of the Great Depression and New Deal.

Primary resources abound in the "New Deal Document Library." Browse the collection by subject, date, author, or publisher. Perhaps more interesting to students is the photo gallery, well organized by subject, including the arts, construction, social programs, and federal agencies. Teachers will find lesson plans and information to help them discover local and state New Deal resources. The Student Showcase includes classroom-created web sites that document local history, such as Rocky Gap High School's Bland County (VA) History Archives, which includes oral histories. Click on Subjects and learn about the town's farming, churches, logging, and schools through poignant black-and-white photographs and brief text.

The New Deal Network also presents featured topics, like the Great Depression and the Arts, selections from the WPA Slave Narratives project, and more.

American History 1930–1939
www.nhmccd.edu/contracts/lrc/kc/decade30.html

Kingwood College Library, TX, presents American history by decade, with an extensive page on 1930–1939. It provides sections on art and architecture, literature, fashion and fads, music, events, and people of the time. Each section is written as a brief essay, with web links within the text so students may explore a particular topic further or read the full text of primary documents. The art and architecture section, for example, includes links to the Public Works of Art Project, Jackson Pollock and Georgia O'Keeffe, Mount Rushmore, and the Chrysler Building. The site also includes a quick facts box about the decade with typical life expectancy, average salary, and the average cost of milk and bread. Well-selected photographs accompany the text.

Modern World History: The Wall Street Crash
www.bbc.co.uk/education/modern/crash/crashhtm.htm

The BBC presents a well-designed site that simply and clearly explains the October 1929 stock market crash and how it led not only America but the entire world into a Depression. The site explains what caused the crash and uses graphs to illustrate how the American people were affected. It outlines Hoover's "rugged individualism" policy, which kept the federal government from assisting citizens, then explains how the New Deal created jobs and restored people's confidence in the federal government.
The site also explains how the Depression affected Britain and Germany, something not often covered in American history books.

Riding the Rails
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rails

This companion to PBS's "American Experience" program of the same name discusses the Great Depression phenomenon where more than 250,000 teenagers became hobos, living on the rails. The site includes a Depression time line, a map of the routes, and a teacher's guide. The most captivating section is "Tales from the Rails," with seven official and numerous visitor-submitted stories by former teen hobos. Students will be drawn in by these stories that put a personal spin on what are usually just dry facts. "Striking a Chord" includes an essay on the hobo's musical heritage, with four songs that students can listen to. "Added Obstacles" is an essay on the unique difficulties encountered by African American hobos.

Surviving the Dust Bowl
www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl

PBS introduces the Dust Bowl experience through well-chosen personal stories and poignant photographs. The site recounts one Kansas wheat farmer's story of survival during the many immobilizing dust storms. It also includes a brief summary explaining how the government's New Deal initiative was created to restore health to the country's weak economy. The site's brief time line section highlights the yearly events and tragedies of the 1930s, and its simple yet effective map illustrates the extent of the Dust Bowl across the plains. Younger students will learn about the prairie's devastation and people's desperation from the succinct text and carefully selected images.

Then and Now: Prices
www.sos.state.mi.us/history/museum/kidstuff/depressn/costlist.html

How much did toys and clothing cost during the Great Depression of the 1930s? What would they cost today? The Michigan Historical Center's Kid Stuff has created this great worksheet so students can gain a better perspective on 1930s expenses and wages. Students can use their local newspaper to find current prices of clothing, games, home furniture, and wages. Once students finish this activity, they can click on the Great Depression Gallery link to read a simulated 1930s newspaper about cultural fads and political issues of the time.

Voices from the Dust Bowl
lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/tshome.html

This Library of Congress American Memory site provides a glimpse into the lives of migrant work camp residents in central California in the early 1940s. Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection is an online presentation of a multiformat ethnographic field collection documenting the everyday life of Farm Security Administration migrant workers.

The site includes audio recordings, photographs, scrapbooks, and manuscripts. Most interesting is the music. Students can browse song titles, then listen to audio clips of dance tunes, cowboy songs, traditional ballads, and much more. This is a great resource to enhance and enrich any Great Depression curriculum.

We Made Do: Recalling the Great Depression
www.mcsc.k12.in.us/mhs/social/madedo/

We Made Do is an ongoing project of the students in Mooresville High School, IN. It captures their town's Depression experience through transcribed oral histories, photographs, and local research. It includes a teachers' guide to using We Made Do, a Webquest activity on the Great Depression, as well as lists of Great Depression and oral history resources. Online visitors with their own stories may submit them for posting. It also includes a 1930–33 price index for goods like butter, milk, and toilet paper.

Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song
memory.loc.gov/ammem/wwghtml/wwghome.html

This Library of Congress American Memory web site presents a comprehensive site on Woody Guthrie, one of the first American folk singers who wrote songs about the Dust Bowl, migrant workers in California, and American life throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Though this site presents digital reproductions of Guthrie's prolific correspondence to family, friends, and officials, it also presents a brief yet effective biography: Rambling Round: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. There is also a time line of his life that includes images. Young students will find this is a good introduction to Guthrie.

America: From the Great Depression to World War II
memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html

This Library of Congress American Memory site provides access to 160,000 black-and-white and 1600 color photographs from the Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information Collection. These photographs document the effects of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in rural America through the beginning of World War II. Students can browse the collection by subject, creator, or geographic location. For example, to look for photographs of Portland, OR, during the Depression, click on "Geographic Location Index," select "Oregon—Clatsop County—Astoria," then click on "Oregon-Multnomah County-Portland." From here one may open one of 35 photographs of the area. Browse the "Creator Index" (photographers) to view over 3900 Dorothea Lange photographs. Reprints of most photos are available for purchase through the Library of Congress.

America In the 1930s
xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/home_1.html

The University of Virginia presents a fascinating site about American lifestyle and culture of the 1930s. Students should visit the "1930s Timeline" for an overview. Click on each year to discover important events in politics, science, culture, and world events. Following this review, students click on "Film" to discover the decade's advances in cinema, including the creation of Citizen Kane, The Wizard of Oz, and the Marx Brothers'Duck Soup. Click on "In Print" and then "Events" under News to compare the American and European 1930s depressions. This section also surveys the print world, including books, magazines, comics, sports, and advertising.

The "On Air" section introduces students to 1930s radio, including a sample daily radio schedule, and audio samples from music and radio serials of the day. Each section presents in-depth information so students have a well-rounded understanding of life and times during the 1930s. The art, architecture, and design section doesn't provide as much detail as the other three sections, but the university states that more information will be added to the site.

American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers Project, 1936–1940
lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html

Another site from the Library of Congress's (LC) American Memory project, these life histories were written by the staff of the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers'' Project for the U.S. Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1940. LC's collection includes 2900 documents representing the work of over 300 writers from 24 states. Typically 2000–15,000 words in length, the histories describe the informant's family education, income, occupation, political views, religion and mores, medical needs, diet, and miscellaneous observations. Pseudonyms are often substituted for individuals and places named in the narrative texts. The collection, which can be grouped by states, is searchable through keywords. An essay explains who the Federal Writers were and what their work entailed.

In Search of the American Hobo
xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/white/hobo/firstpage.html

This site, constructed by the American Studies Program at the University of Virginia, introduces students to the life of the hobo, a free-spirited, roaming character who first appeared in American culture between the Civil War and World War II. The hobo lifestyle became prominent during the Depression years as many of the jobless and homeless took to riding the rails across the country. This site looks at who the hobo was, where he came from, and where he was going. Following the introduction page, students may click on one of three chapter links that explain the creation and rise of the hobo before, during, and after the Depression.

Woody Guthrie: This Man is Your Myth This Man is My Myth
xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/RADIO/woody/woodyhome.html

The University of Virginia's American Studies program has created a thorough resource, this time on the life of Woody Guthrie. This attractively designed site addresses Guthrie the man, the musician, and the myth. Students may read a reflective biography of his childhood and early life in Okemah, OK. The site includes sections dedicated to Guthrie's image as a Dust Bowl refugee, folk hero, American hero, and postmodern hero. Each section includes expressive photographs of Guthrie, 1930s America, and his artistic cartoons and paintings.

Primary Documents from Bedford/St.Martin's Press
http://bedfordstmartins.com/doclinks/links_topic.asp?topicid=111

This site presents a wide variety documents including transcripts of speeches by Franklin Roosevelt and others.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal
http://geocities.com/Athens/4545/index.html

This site contains a good selection of primary sources mainly relating to Franklin Roosevelt, but it also contains leads to sites with other primary and secondary source information.

Studs Terkel and Oral History of the Depression Years
Studs Terkel: Conversations With America
Chicago Historical Society
http://www.studsterkel.org/index.html

Studs Terkel wrote the first oral history of the Great Depression, Hard Times (1970) and is regard as one of America's leading oral historians. Part of the digital repository, Historical Voices, this site was created in honor of Studs Terkel, the noted oral historian, radio host of “The Studs Terkel Program,” and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Dedicated to making Terkel’s 50 years of work available, it presents material pulled from approximately 5,000 hours of sound recordings. The seven galleries—The Studs Terkel Program; Division Street: America; Hard Times; The Good War; Race; Talking to Myself; and Greatest Hits—center on the extensive interviews Terkel completed for the radio show and his books and contain more than 300 audio clips of interviews. Most of the interviews are about 15 minutes in length and explore diverse subjects, including Chicago architecture, urban landscape, immigrants, street life, the 1929 stock market crash, organized labor, New Deal programs, race relations, and integration. Interviewees include Chicago architect Frank Lloyd Wright and labor activist Cesar Chavez as well as men and women on a train to Washington D.C. for the 1963 Civil Rights March. Sound recordings are searchable by date, keyword, or author. Complementing this site is an educational section intended to help students and teachers use oral history in the classroom and a 55-minute interview with Terkel. This well-designed site offers a rich history of many influential, as well as lesser-known, personalities living in the second half of the 20th century and is beneficial to anyone interested in the Great Depression, World War II, race relations, and labor issues.
Resources Available: TEXT, IMAGES, AUDIO, VIDEO.