Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Hard Times

One thing the economic downturn has done is inspire people to be creative about saving money. Cooking at home, trading or bartering goods and services, and learning new practical skills are all on our minds right now. I don't want to draw too sharp of a comparison between our current predicament and the Great Depression of the 1930s, but the library has been getting some new books that give us a window into daily life during that period, and, well, I gotta share some of them with you!

If you want a feel for what life was like in some other place and time, a book of documentary photographs is a darned good place to start. Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field brings together a collection of photographs from Lange's 1939 trips to photograph regular people who were hard hit by the Depression in California, the Pacific Northwest, and North Carolina. The photographs, which are published here for the first time, include portraits, landscapes, and scenes of communities, and many are truly stunning.  Author Anne Whiston Spirn's history of Lange's work as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration is also fascinating.

The Great Depression was great in many senses – one was that it affected people all over the globe. Australians were seriously hard hit, and as unemployment rose and consumer spending dropped, many people faced eviction and homelessness. Iain MacIntyre's brief, beautifully made zine Lock out the Landlords chronicles the history of the Australian eviction resistance movement, illustrated with historic photographs and brief excerpts from contemporary newspaper reports on housing-related grassroots activism.

Back here in Oregon, Elaine Dahl Rohse's Depression-era childhood was spent on a cattle ranch near Monument, in Grant County. Her memoir Poverty Wasn't Painful recalls those years with humor and good grace about the difficulties of the era. Rohse started her writing career as a newspaper journalist, and her short, breezy chapters read like a newspaper column – interesting, opinionated, and friendly – and she discusses a wide-ranging array of topics: playing high school basketball; huckleberry picking; the daily chore of washing dishes; her mom's careful husbanding of bacon fat; and many, many more.