Images of Depression-Era Louisiana

Images of Depression-Era Louisiana PDF Author: Bryan Giemza
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807167959
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the 1930s, the U.S. government famously sent photographers across the country to document on film the need for federal assistance in rural areas. Dorothea Lange’s well-known image Migrant Mother came from this effort, along with thousands of other photographs. Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and Marion Post Wolcott contributed to this compelling body of images. As primary photographers for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the state of Louisiana, the three took more than 2,600 photographs, recording the modest homes, family gatherings, and working lives of citizens across the state. In Images of Depression-Era Louisiana, Bryan Giemza and Maria Hebert-Leiter curate more than 150 of those photographs, offering a riveting collection that captures this pivotal time in Louisiana’s history. The book’s stunning photo gallery, with original captions, provides a moving visual tour of Louisiana during a period of economic struggle and transition. Organized by photographer, parish, and date, the revealing images reflect an era when extreme poverty exacerbated the divide between classes and races. Scenes of agricultural and rural communities—families in clapboard houses, sugarcane cutters in the field, and trappers navigating bayous—as well as cityscapes of New Orleans’s bustling markets, busy docks, and peaceful Jackson Square demonstrate the scope of the photographers’ work and the diversity of conditions and occupations they found. Giemza and Hebert-Leiter trace the genesis of the FSA Collection, examine its role in promoting the documentary style of picture-taking, and explore the motivations and methods of the collection’s head, Roy E. Stryker. They sketch the biographies, techniques, and perspectives of Shahn, Lee, and Wolcott, explaining how the photographers operated in Louisiana from their first experiences to their last days in the state. Letters and other archival documents further illuminate the three artists’ impressions of Louisiana, its people, and its traditions.

Images of Depression-Era Louisiana

Images of Depression-Era Louisiana PDF Author: Bryan Giemza
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807167959
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the 1930s, the U.S. government famously sent photographers across the country to document on film the need for federal assistance in rural areas. Dorothea Lange’s well-known image Migrant Mother came from this effort, along with thousands of other photographs. Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and Marion Post Wolcott contributed to this compelling body of images. As primary photographers for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the state of Louisiana, the three took more than 2,600 photographs, recording the modest homes, family gatherings, and working lives of citizens across the state. In Images of Depression-Era Louisiana, Bryan Giemza and Maria Hebert-Leiter curate more than 150 of those photographs, offering a riveting collection that captures this pivotal time in Louisiana’s history. The book’s stunning photo gallery, with original captions, provides a moving visual tour of Louisiana during a period of economic struggle and transition. Organized by photographer, parish, and date, the revealing images reflect an era when extreme poverty exacerbated the divide between classes and races. Scenes of agricultural and rural communities—families in clapboard houses, sugarcane cutters in the field, and trappers navigating bayous—as well as cityscapes of New Orleans’s bustling markets, busy docks, and peaceful Jackson Square demonstrate the scope of the photographers’ work and the diversity of conditions and occupations they found. Giemza and Hebert-Leiter trace the genesis of the FSA Collection, examine its role in promoting the documentary style of picture-taking, and explore the motivations and methods of the collection’s head, Roy E. Stryker. They sketch the biographies, techniques, and perspectives of Shahn, Lee, and Wolcott, explaining how the photographers operated in Louisiana from their first experiences to their last days in the state. Letters and other archival documents further illuminate the three artists’ impressions of Louisiana, its people, and its traditions.

Sharecropping in North Louisiana

Sharecropping in North Louisiana PDF Author: Lillian Laird Duff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781947987036
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
A Family's history lives and dies according to the dedication of it's storyteller. author Lillian Laird Duff is one such historian and with the encouragement and help of her daughter Linda Duff Niemeir, the stories of this sharecropper's daughter will spark in readers the desire to keep their own family histories alive. Sharecropping in North Louisiana is the true story of the hardships Lillian's family faced during the Great Depression and World War I I. The word-pictures Lillian paints are vivid and will bring to life for readers a time when people were forced to get by with what they had. It will also leave readers hungry for a home-cooked meal, as Lillian recalls food preparation on the farm with such richness and delight that you can almost smell the smoked pork and taste the homemade ice cream and butter. Join Linda in listening to her mother's stories once more.

Mardi Gras Beads

Mardi Gras Beads PDF Author: Doug MacCash
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807177520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
Beads are one of the great New Orleans symbols, as much a signifier of the city as a pot of scarlet crawfish or a jazzman’s trumpet. They are Louisiana’s version of the Hawaiian lei, strung around tourists’ and conventioneers’ necks to demonstrate enthusiasm for the city. The first in a new LSU Press series exploring facets of Louisiana’s iconic culture, Mardi Gras Beads delves into the history of this celebrated New Orleans artifact, explaining how Mardi Gras beads came to be in the first place and how they grew to have such an outsize presence in New Orleans celebrations. Beads are a big business based on valuelessness. Approximately 130 shipping containers, each filled with 40,000 pounds of Chinese-made beads and other baubles, arrive at New Orleans’s biggest Mardi Gras throw importer each Carnival season. Beads are an unnatural part of the natural landscape, persistently dangling from the trees along parade routes like Spanish moss. They clutter the doorknobs of the city, sway behind its rearview mirrors, test the load-bearing strength of its attic rafters, and clog its all-important rainwater removal system. Mardi Gras Beads traces the history of these parade trinkets from their origins before World War One through their ascent to the premier parade catchable by the Depression era. Veteran Mardi Gras reporter Doug MacCash explores the manufacture of Mardi Gras beads in places as far-flung as the Sudetenland, India, and Japan, and traces the shift away from glass beads to the modern, disposable plastic versions. Mardi Gras Beads concludes in the era of coronavirus, when parades (and therefore bead throwing) were temporarily suspended because of health concerns, and considers the future of biodegradable Mardi Gras beads in a city ever more threatened by the specter of climate change.

Reassessing the 1930s South

Reassessing the 1930s South PDF Author: Karen Cox
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807169234
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Much of American popular culture depicts the 1930s South either as home to a population that was intellectually, morally, and physically stunted, or as a romantic, sentimentalized haven untouched by the nation’s financial troubles. Though these images stand as polar opposites, each casts the South as an exceptional region that stood separate from American norms. Reassessing the 1930s South brings together historians, art critics, and literary scholars to provide a new social and cultural history of the Great Depression South that moves beyond common stereotypes of the region. Essays by Steven Knepper, Anthony J. Stanonis, and Bryan A. Giemza delve into the literary culture of the 1930s South and the multiple ways authors such as Sterling Brown, Tennessee Williams, and E. P. O’Donnell represented the region to outsiders. Lisa Dorrill and Robert W. Haynes explore connections between artists and the South in essays on New Deal murals and southern dramatists on Broadway. Rejecting traditional views of southern resistance to modernization, Douglas E. Thompson and Ted Atkinson survey the cultural impacts of technological advancement and industrialization. Emily Senefeld, Scott L. Matthews, Rebecca Sharpless, and Melissa Walker compare public representations of the South in the 1930s to the circumstances of everyday life. Finally, Ella Howard, Nicholas Roland, and Robert Hunt Ferguson examine the ways southern governments and activists shaped racial perceptions and realities in Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee. Reassessing the 1930s South provides an interpretation that focuses on the region’s embrace of technological innovation, promotion of government-sponsored programs of modernization, rejection of the plantation legend of the late nineteenth century, and experimentation with unionism and interracialism. Taken collectively, these essays provide a better understanding of the region’s identity, both real and perceived, as well as how southerners grappled with modernity during a decade of uncertainty and economic hardship.

Aberration of Mind

Aberration of Mind PDF Author: Diane Miller Sommerville
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146964357X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
More than 150 years after its end, we still struggle to understand the full extent of the human toll of the Civil War and the psychological crisis it created. In Aberration of Mind, Diane Miller Sommerville offers the first book-length treatment of suicide in the South during the Civil War era, giving us insight into both white and black communities, Confederate soldiers and their families, as well as the enslaved and newly freed. With a thorough examination of the dynamics of both racial and gendered dimensions of psychological distress, Sommerville reveals how the suffering experienced by Southerners living in a war zone generated trauma that, in extreme cases, led some Southerners to contemplate or act on suicidal thoughts. Sommerville recovers previously hidden stories of individuals exhibiting suicidal activity or aberrant psychological behavior she links to the war and its aftermath. This work adds crucial nuance to our understanding of how personal suffering shaped the way southerners viewed themselves in the Civil War era and underscores the full human costs of war.

Dust Bowl Girls

Dust Bowl Girls PDF Author: Lydia Reeder
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616206535
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
“A thrilling, cinematic story. I loved every minute I spent with these bold, daring women whose remarkable journey is the stuff of American legend.” —Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy The Boys in the Boat meets A League of Their Own in this true story of a Depression-era championship women’s team. In the early 1930s, during the worst drought and financial depression in American history, Sam Babb began to dream. Like so many others, this charismatic Midwestern basketball coach wanted a reason to have hope. Traveling from farm to farm near the tiny Oklahoma college where he coached, Babb recruited talented, hardworking young women and offered them a chance at a better life: a free college education in exchange for playing on his basketball team, the Cardinals. Despite their fears of leaving home and the sacrifices that their families would face, the women joined the team. And as Babb coached the Cardinals, something extraordinary happened. These remarkable athletes found a passion for the game and a heartfelt loyalty to one another and their coach--and they began to win. Combining exhilarating sports writing and exceptional storytelling, Dust Bowl Girls takes readers on the Cardinals’ intense, improbable journey all the way to an epic showdown with the prevailing national champions, helmed by the legendary Babe Didrikson. Lydia Reeder captures a moment in history when female athletes faced intense scrutiny from influential figures in politics, education, and medicine who denounced women’s sports as unhealthy and unladylike. At a time when a struggling nation was hungry for inspiration, this unlikely group of trailblazers achieved much more than a championship season.

Hard Luck Blues

Hard Luck Blues PDF Author: Rich Remsberg
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252056205
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Showcasing American music and music making during the Great Depression, Hard Luck Blues presents more than two hundred photographs created by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration photography program. With an appreciation for the amateur and the local, FSA photographers depicted a range of musicians sharing the regular music of everyday life, from informal songs in migrant work camps, farmers' homes, barn dances, and on street corners to organized performances at church revivals, dance halls, and community festivals. Captured across the nation from the northeast to the southwest, the images document the last generation of musicians who learned to play without the influence of recorded sound, as well as some of the pioneers of Chicago's R & B scene and the first years of amplified instruments. The best visual representation of American roots music performance during the Depression era, Hard Luck Blues features photographs by Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, and others. Photographer and image researcher Rich Remsberg breathes life into the images by providing contextual details about the persons and events captured, in some cases drawing on interviews with the photographers' subjects. Also included are a foreword by author Nicholas Dawidoff and an afterword by music historian Henry Sapoznik. Published in association with the Library of Congress.

Collard Greens

Collard Greens PDF Author: Thomas Sylvest
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781427618924
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Collard Greens is full of interesting true life stories about a child in a large family growing up on a subsistence farm in Louisiana during the Great Depression. It also features many experiences of this child's life as a young adult.

Hollywood's Image of the South

Hollywood's Image of the South PDF Author: David Ebner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313016976
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
From the 1920s and 1930s, when American cinema depicted the South as a demi-paradise populated by wealthy landowners, glamorous belles, and happy slaves, through later, more realistic depictions of the region in films based on works by Erskine Caldwell, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, and Robert Penn Warren, Hollywood's view of the South has been as ever-changing as the place itself. This comprehensive reference guide to Southern films offers credits, plot descriptions, and analyses of how the stereotypes and characterizations in each film contribute to our understanding of a most contentious American time and place. Organized by subjects including Economic Conditions, Plantation Life, The Ku Klux Klan, and The New Politics, Hollywood's Image of the South seeks to coin a new genre by describing its conventions and attitudes. Even so, the Southern film crosses all known generic boundaries, including the comedy, the women's film, the noir, and many others. This invaluable guide to an under-recognized category of American cinema illustrates how much there is to learn about a time and place from watching the movies that aim to capture it.

Time of the Locust

Time of the Locust PDF Author: Morowa Yejide
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476731365
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
" . . . A novel about an autistic boy whose drawings represent something much deeper than even the doctors who study can grasp; his father, serving 25 to life for murder; his mother, trying to hold herself together and fix her broken child. It's a supernatural journey of crime and punishment, retribution and redemption that ultimately leads to a father saving his son, a mother connecting with her child, and an American family reclaiming itself"--