Instrucciones Kindly take notes on the material in red, which will appear on test materials in the near future!

Instrucciones

Kindly take notes on the material in red, which will appear on test materials in the near future!

The Great Depression

The Great Depression began with the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, also known as Black Tuesday.

The Depression had devastating effects in the US, and around the world.

Street scene on Black Tuesday

People who had gone to bed with thousands of dollars in the bank woke up to discover that they only had the money in their pockets.

Car for sale in New York

People in the Plains States were particularly hard hit with a severe drought, dust storms, and the Depression.

Many came west to find work. So many migrated from Oklahoma, they become known as “Okies.”

The “Okies” were also trying to escape the “Dust Bowl,” a series of dust storms that caused major agricultural damage to the Great Plains from 1930 to 1936. At times, the clouds blackened the sky all the way to California. Millions of acres of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands of families were forced to leave their homes.

Families on the road, traveling west.

Leaving South Dakota for

Oregon

Okies driving to California

Migrant families camped out

Cooking supper in a shanty, a temporary

home

Farmers sometimes allowed migrant workers and families to camp while they were harvesting crops. This often led to “squatter camps” where people began living in thrown-together shacks.

Squatter’s shack

18 year old mother at a migrant camp

A school for migrant worker’s kids

Christmas dinner for a migrant family

Breadlines became common, as people struggled to feed themselves and their

families

Jobs were scarce as the

unemployment levels soared

Migrant workers camp

Dorothea Lange’s photo,

“Migrant Mother,” perhaps the most famous image from the

Great Depression

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was one of the best-known and most widely read American writers of the 20th century. Steinbeck grew up in the Salinas Valley region of California, an agricultural area, a diverse place of rich migratory and immigrant history.

Salinas, California

In 1937, John Steinbeck published his novella “Of

Mice and Men,” the tragic story of two

migrant ranch workers, George and Lennie,

during the Great Depression in California.

Of Mice and Men

The title is taken from Robert Burns' poem, To a Mouse, often quoted as: "The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry." Required reading in many American, Australian, British, New Zealand, and Canadian high schools, Of Mice and Men has been a frequent target of censors for what some consider "offensive" and "vulgar" language; consequently, it appears on the American Library Association's list of the Most Challenged Books of 21st Century.