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U.S. History: 1877 to present - HIST202 - Primary Sources

Primary sources available in the library or on the Internet relevant to U.S. History after 1877

Resources in Library Catalog

eBooks on this list are only available to RVCC students, faculty, and staff and require a login with your G# and password.

Documentary portrait of Mississippi : the thirties

Walker Evans and his colleagues, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott, photographers for the Farm Security Administration, introduced a way of seeing and a commitment that put the word documentary into the lexicon of serious photography...These images help define for us the meaning of the Depression in Mississippi.

The great depression

A collection of newspaper articles and essays written during the Depression, detailing the conditions faced by various individuals and social classes. Includes first- person and eye-witness accounts.

The Great Depression : a Diary

Benjamin Roth was born in New York City in 1894 and received a law before serving as an Army officer during World War I. When the stock market crashed in 1929, he had been practicing law for approximately ten years. After he began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to American economic life, he started writing down his impressions in a diary that he maintained intermittently until he died in 1978 (eBook).

The Great Depression and New Deal : documents decoded

The political ideas that resulted from confronting the crisis of the Great Depression and the New Deal of the early 20th century reshaped America. This documentary history collects a range of primary sources to illuminate this critical period in U.S. history.

Hard times : an oral history of the great depression

A re-creation of the America of the thirties, based on the reminiscences of a cross-section of people representing all walks of life, including several notable personalities.

Homeless, friendless, and penniless : the WPA interviews with former slaves living in Indiana

Includes interviews of 134 former slaves conducted in the 1930s by fieldworkers of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration.

I'll take my stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition

From the introduction: "The authors contributing to this book are Southerners, well acquainted with one another and of similar tastes... By conversation and exchange of letters over a number of years it had developed that they entertained many convictions in common, and it was decided to make a volume..." Originally published in 1930.

The New Deal

A collection of articles that were originally published in the New York Times during the era of the New Deal.

The New Deal: a documentary history

A collection of articles, essays, and book fragments written during the New Deal era and covering topics including opposition to the New Deal and the impending war.

New Deal thought

This anthology assembles the contemporary writings not only of the New Dealers―the men who devised and executed the programs of the government in the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt―but also of the "social critics" who "gathered in various stances and at various distances around the Roosevelt fires."

Official images : New Deal photography

Compiles photographs from five different sources in the New Deal: the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the National Youth Administration (NYA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), as well as the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

Posters of the WPA

These posters were designed for other federal agencies, and as travel posters, education and civic activity posters, health and safety posters, and propaganda posters for World War II.

Strike songs of the depression

This book examines the songs American workers sang at three different strikes - the Gastonia, North Carolina, textile mill strike (1929), Harlan County, Kentucky coal mining strike (1931-32), and Flint, Michigan automobile sit down strike (1936-37). Much of the text in this book is secondary source material, but it does contain song lyrics which are primary sources (eBook).

These are our lives

Life histories of 37 ordinary citizens, both black and white, in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia collected by the Federal Writers's Project as part of Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. The intention was to create a faithful representation of southern society. Originally published in 1939.

Women of valor : the struggle against the Great Depression as told in their own life stories

Presents autobiographical accounts of women who influenced government and labor policy during the Depression, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Lillian Wald.

Resources in Library Databases

Off campus, these resources are available only to RVCC students, staff, and faculty and require a login with your G# and password.

Perform a keyword search, then select Primary Sources from the tabbed results.

Primary sources

To browse, select Primary Sources and then The Great Depression: 1929-1941

Primary Sources       Great Depression

Resources on the Internet