The Great Depression, a profound economic downturn lasting from 1929 to the late 1930s, saw widespread unemployment, poverty, and economic instability in the United States and globally. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, a series of sweeping reforms and relief programs aimed at revitalizing the economy and providing social support. The New Deal included initiatives such as public works projects, financial regulations, and social welfare programs, fundamentally reshaping the role of government in American society. While controversial, the New Deal significantly influenced economic policy and laid the groundwork for modern social welfare programs.
The Primary Source Guide on the Great Depression and the New Deal offers firsthand accounts and documents illuminating this transformative period in American history. Through government records, personal narratives, and more, readers explore the social, economic, and political dimensions, gaining insight into the era's challenges and responses.
1930s & 40s America in Color (Library of Congress via Flickr) These vivid color photos from the Great Depression and World War II capture an era generally seen only in black-and-white. Photographers working for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) created the images between 1939 and 1944. We invite your tags and comments! Also, more identification information. (The current titles come from the agency's original documentation, which was sometimes incomplete.) The FSA/OWI pictures depict life in the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, with a focus on rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working. The original images are color transparencies ranging in size from 35 mm. to 4x5 inches. They complement the better-known black-and-white FSA/OWI photographs, made during the same period. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division preserves the original photographs and offers the digital copies to ensure their wide availability. For more information about the collection and to see the approximately 171,000 black-and-white photos, visit: www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsac/
The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship The exhibition The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying more than 240 items, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings, this is the largest black history exhibit ever held at the Library, and the first exhibition of any kind to feature presentations in all three of the Library's buildings.
America from the Great Depression to World War II: Color Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1939-1945 (Library of Congress) The photographs in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944. This U.S. government photography project was headed for most of its existence by Roy E. Stryker, who guided the effort in a succession of government agencies: the Resettlement Administration (1935-1937), the Farm Security Administration (1937-1942), and the Office of War Information (1942-1944). The collection also includes photographs acquired from other governmental and non-governmental sources, including the News Bureau at the Offices of Emergency Management (OEM), various branches of the military, and industrial corporations. In total, the black-and-white portion of the collection consists of about 175,000 black-and-white film negatives, encompassing both negatives that were printed for FSA-OWI use and those that were not printed at the time. Color transparencies also made by the FSA/OWI are available in a separate section of the catalog: FSA/OWI Color Photographs
American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project 1936-1940 (Library of Congress) This collection of life histories consists of approximately 2,900 documents, compiled and transcribed by more than 300 writers from 24 states, working on the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal jobs program that was part of the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from 1936 to 1940. Typically 2,000-15,000 words in length, the documents vary in form from narratives to dialogues to reports to case histories. They chronicle vivid life stories of Americans who lived at the turn of the century and include tales of meeting Billy the Kid, surviving the 1871 Chicago fire, pioneer journeys out West, grueling factory work, and the immigrant experience. Writers hired by this Depression-era work project included Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, May Swenson, and many others. The documents often describe the informant’s physical appearance, family, education, income, occupation, political views, religion and mores. Pseudonyms are often substituted for individuals and places named in the narrative texts. The life histories comprise a small part of the larger Manuscript Division collection titled United States Work Projects Administration Records.
Built in America: Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record 1933-present (Library of Congress) The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections are among the largest and most heavily used in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Since 2000, documentation from the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) has been added to the holdings. The collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and landscape design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types, engineering technologies, and landscapes, including examples as diverse as the Pueblo of Acoma, houses, windmills, one-room schools, the Golden Gate Bridge, and buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Administered since 1933 through cooperative agreements with the National Park Service, the Library of Congress, and the private sector, ongoing programs of the National Park Service have recorded America's built environment in multiformat surveys comprising more than 581,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 43,000 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century. This online presentation of the HABS/HAER/HALS collections includes digitized images of measured drawings, black-and-white photographs, color transparencies, photo captions, written history pages, and supplemental materials. Since the National Park Service's HABS, HAER and HALS programs create new documentation each year, documentation will continue to be added to the collections. The first phase of digitization of the Historic American Engineering Record collection was made possible by the generous support of the Shell Oil Company Foundation.
Bureau of Economic Analysis (Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Dept. of Commerce) Includes economic surveys, data, and articles from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as later decades. Look at the National, International, and Regional tabs.
Civil Works Administration: Photos (Univ. of Washington) Photos documenting CWA construction and labor projects in Washington State in the 1930s, under Roosevelt's New Deal.
Documents from Roosevelt's First One Hundred Days (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum) The dark months before FDR’s inauguration were the bleakest of the Great Depression. One in four workers was jobless. One in five Americans survived on meager relief payments. The stock market was down 75 percent from 1929. Exports were at their lowest level since 1904. In just four years, the suicide rate had tripled.
FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration): Photos (Univ. of Washington) Approximately 250 photos document FERA contruction and labor projects in Washington State in the 1930s, under Roosevelt's New Deal.
Great Depression and New Deal: A General Resource Guide (Library of Congress) The digital collections available from the Library of Congress are rich in primary and secondary source materials from all periods of U.S. history. You will find a broad range of formats in the collections ranging from first-hand accounts (both written and recorded) to documentation of people and events during this period of history. Visual and performing artists responded through folk song, theatrical performances, and visual materials. This section of the guide will assist you in locating relevant collections and individual items using the Library's website.
The Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945) (DocsTeach) This collection comes from the National Archives and combines photos and documents.
Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945 (Library of Congress) The widespread prosperity of the 1920s ended abruptly with the stock market crash in October 1929 and the great economic depression that followed. The depression threatened people's jobs, savings, and even their homes and farms. At the depths of the depression, over one-quarter of the American workforce was out of work. For many Americans, these were hard times.
Great Depression Interviews (Washington Univ.) 110+ hours of interviews with 148 people who experienced the Great Depression (originating from The Great Depression a seven-part documentary series from Blackside, Inc., which first aired on PBS in 1993) From the stock market crash of 1929 to the beginnings of World War II, The Great Depression tells the dramatic and diverse stories of struggle and survival during the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. Originally debuting on PBS stations in 1993, the 7-part series was met with critical acclaim, winning an Emmy for writing and a duPont-Columbia Award. These interviews are part of the Henry Hampton Collection housed at the Film & Media Archive at Washington University Libraries. Each video and transcript represents the entire interview conducted by Blackside, Inc., including portions that did not appear in the final program. For more information, please contact the Film & Media Archive.
The Great Depression in the United States - Statistics & Facts (Statista) The Wall Street Crash in the autumn of 1929 marked the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States. What started as a stock market crash then quickly became a banking crisis, which spread into virtually all other sectors of the economy, causing it to collapse. The Great Depression then saw the most prolonged recession in U.S. history, with the highest-ever unemployment rates, and it was not until the Second World War that many of the affected areas saw recovery and growth.
Great Depression Primary Sources & Teaching Activities (National Archives) You can find primary sources and learning activities for teaching about the Great Depression on DocsTeach, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.
The Hoover Dam (The Herbert Hoover Presential Library) Eighty-five years after its completion, Hoover dam is still considered an engineering marvel. It is named in honor of President Herbert Hoover, — who played a crucial role in its creation. In 1922, the U.S. Reclamation Service settled on Black Canyon as the ideal location for a dam. They had initially chosen Boulder Canyon (unfortunately located on a seismic fault line), which gave the project its first name, Boulder Dam.
The New Deal (Digital Public Library of America) The 1929 stock market crash triggered a massive economic downturn that would plague not only the United States but also other nations for many years. The prosperity of the 1920s had not been widely shared, with half of all American families living at or below the poverty line even before the market crash. As banks failed and unemployment soared to 25 percent, the resulting economic devastation plunged countless Americans into poverty, leaving some homeless and many standing in breadlines. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932, he promised a “New Deal.” The programs established by his administration, ranging from the Works Progress Administration to Social Security, would greatly expand the responsibilities and power of the federal government, giving rise to the modern welfare state. This source set allows you to explore the crisis of the Great Depression, as well as the dramatic developments of the New Deal, through photographs, speeches, letters, and oral histories.
The New Deal (Library of Congress) In July of 1932, in the midst of the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history, Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, promising “a new deal for the American people.” That promise became a series of relief, recovery, and reform programs designed to provide assistance to the unemployed and poor, revive the economy, and change the financial system to prevent another depression.
The New Deal (National Archives) Links to web sites relating to the New Deal era useful for research on New Deal agriculture, labor, and arts programs.
New Deal Programs: Selected Library of Congress Resources "created to serve as a starting point for research using Library of Congress collections of New Deal program materials. While this guide is by no means comprehensive, it provides an overview of special collections held by the Library of Congress and links to digitized materials and selected resources relating to New Deal programs in Library of Congress divisions. The guide also links to major collections of New Deal program materials held at other institutions."
Photogrammar: Explore Great Depression Photos (Yale University) Web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) and held by the Library of Congress. Although the photos are available in numerous places, these tools make it easier to explore them. (Yale Univ.)
Work Projects Administration (WPA) Posters 1936-1943 (Library of Congress) The Work Projects Administration (WPA) Poster Collection consists of 907 posters produced from 1936 to 1943 by various branches of the WPA. Of the 2,000 WPA posters known to exist, the Library of Congress's collection of more than 900 is the largest. The posters were designed to publicize exhibits, community activities, theatrical productions, and health and educational programs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia, with the strongest representation from California, Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The results of one of the first U.S. Government programs to support the arts, the posters were added to the Library's holdings in the 1940s.
