Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books (October 29, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0316080438
ISBN-13: 978-0316080439


The Great Depression of the 1930s turned the lives of ordinary Americans upside down, leaving an indelible mark on the nation’s psyche. The Great Depression: America in the 1930s is award-winning historian T. H. Watkins’s lively political, economic, and cultural account of this age of hardship and hope. This companion volume to the public television series The Great Depression tells the story of a decade of disaster, challenge, and change. It begins with the most devastating economic crash in modern history and recounts an epic narrative of human suffering, social turmoil, and a political revolution that transformed the outline of American life and government – from unprecedented federal programs such as Social Security, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and massive public works projects to local grass-roots movements whose energies helped forge a new relationship between citizens and their government, citizens and their presidents. During this great era a new kind of hope was born, one that would not only help lead the way out of the despair of the depression but would live on to inspire postwar crusades for civil rights, women’s rights, environmentalism, and other social movements. Illustrated with more than 150 photographs, documents, and posters – many of them published here for the first time – The Great Depression stands as the essential chronicle of a decade that shaped America’s consciousness and character forever in an age not unlike our own.

Illustrated with 154 photos, this companion volume to the popular PBS series brilliantly brings to life the people, the politics, and the devastation of the Great Depression.

A captivating companion volume to the PBS series. Watkins offers a panoramic view of this challenging and painful decade, and includes approximately 150 photographs, posters, and documents. The book surveys the era’s business closures, bank failures, labor movements, unemployed, disenfranchised, soup-kitchen lines, apple sellers, drought, farmers’ strikes, and homeless. Students will appreciate the depth of coverage, the primary-source material, the photographs, the comprehensive index, and the list of additional resources. Anyone interested in history and specifically the cause-and-effect relationships between history and modern life will relish this book.
Sue Davis, Cedar Falls High School, IA ~ School Library Journal

A wealth of information along with many photographs and news clips help to tell the devastating true story between the everyday American people and the Federal Government during the Depression years.

You will read of the hardships that Americans faced during the Great Depression, and their ways for coping with the tough times. You can’t help but draw parallel thoughts on how today’s instant-gratification society with all of its debt and poor saving habits would cope under similar adverse conditions.

About the Author..

T. H. Watkins, a writer and activist, Watkins served as the editor of Wilderness, the magazine of the Wilderness Society, from 1982 until it was discontinued in 1996. He also was a former editor of American West magazine, a senior editor at American Heritage magazine and a contributing editor of Audubon magazine. In 1997, he became the first Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University.

Watkins wrote more than 300 articles and book reviews for journals, magazines and newspapers including National Geographic, Smithsonian, the New York Times and Washington Post. He was an adviser and featured commentator in Ken Burns’ 1996 documentary for the Public Broadcasting Service, “The West.”

He was the author of several books on the Depression and a biography on the New Deal’s Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, for which he is perhaps best known. His most recent book, “The Redrock Chronicles,” played a significant role in the campaign for wilderness preservation in southern Utah. At the time of his death, he was at work on a biography of Wallace Stegner.

In 1999, the Center of the American West chose Watkins as the recipient of its annual Wallace Stegner Award, given to a person with exemplary achievements in expressing the values of the West.

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Images Courtesy of © 2009 Hachette Book Group, Amazon.com