Ch 9.2. Understand how the Great Depression affected American life.

Life during the Great Depression

Ch 9.2

Friday, March 30, 2012

Understand how the Great Depression affected American life.

Do Now…

Get out your Chapter 8 Notes Analysis and make sure that all evidence is underlined and that it is complete, because I am going to collect it for a grade.

Discussion Questions

Where would you go if you had lost your job and couldn’t afford food?

Bread Lines/Soup Kitchens

Americans depended on charities like Bread lines and Soup Kitchen’s to survive, because the gov’t would not help them.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Where would you move if you lost your home and had no money?

Hooverville

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“Hoovervilles”, homeless camps named after the president

Merry Christmas from a Hoover Hotel

Hoovervilles

 By 1933 unemployment reached over 30%

Americans who lost their homes constructed makeshift shacks in shantytowns nicknamed Hoovervilles.

Discussion Questions

What is a drought? How does it affect farming?

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Pictured below is one of thousands of farm foreclosure sales. A foreclosure happens when an owner cannot pay for their mortgage and the bank repossesses the property to sell it.

The Dust Bowl

Drought + Poor farming techniques= "Dust Bowl” in the Great Plains.

Many Farmers lost their farms to foreclosure and left.

Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother

The Okies head to California

People who escaped the Dust Bowl were called “Okies” because many came from Oklahoma (OK)

Many came to CA looking for a better life, but their living conditions only seemed to worsen when they arrived.

Hollywood Fantasies

Positive films helped people escape the Depression.

Walt Disney produced the first full length animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.

Depression Art

John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath which tells the tragic story of an “Okie” family which loses everything in the Dust Bowl and moves west only to find more hardship.