Depression History

Jetta’s family is famed as the most talented troupe of shadow players in the land. With Jetta behind the scrim, their puppets seem to move without string or stick - a trade secret, they say. In truth, Jetta can see the souls of the recently departed and bind them to the puppets with her blood. But ever since the colonizing army conquered their country, the old ways are forbidden, so Jetta must never show, never tell. Her skill and fame are her family’s way to earn a spot aboard the royal ship to Aquitan, where shadow plays are the latest rage.

Welcome to the world of the fabulously wealthy in London, 1909, where dresses and houses are overwhelmingly opulent, social class means everything, and women are taught to be nothing more than wives and mothers. Into this world comes 17-year-old Victoria Darling, who wants only to be an artist - a nearly impossible dream for a girl. After Vicky poses nude for her illicit art class, she is expelled from her French finishing school. Shamed and scandalized, her parents try to marry her off to the wealthy Edmund Carrick-Humphrey. But Vicky has other things on her mind....

Dancing with the Paris Opera ballet is 14-year-old Marie van Goethem's greatest joy. And yet she must honor her father's dying request to keep their poverty-stricken family together. She certainly can't count on the help of her drunken mother or selfish older sister. When famous artist Edgar Degas asks Marie to model for a sculpture, she welcomes the income - although she's hesitant to pose nude.

“Doomed from birth” was how psychologist Harold Skeels described two girls at the Orphans’ Home in Davenport, Iowa, in 1934. Following prevailing eugenic beliefs, Skeels and his colleague Marie Skodak assumed that the girls had inherited their parents’ low intelligence and sent them to an institution. To their astonishment, under the women’s care, the children’s IQ scores became normal. Recasting Skeels and his team as intrepid heroes, Marilyn Brookwood weaves years of prodigious archival research to show how after decades of backlash, the Iowans finally prevailed.

Soul of a People is about a handful of people who joined the Federal Writer's Project in the 1930s and offers a glimpse of America at a turning point. This particular handful of characters went from poverty to great things later, and included John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Jim Thomspon, Anzia Yezierska, Vardis Fisher, Kenneth Rexroth, Meridel Le Sueur, and Studs Terkel. In the 1930s, they were all caught up in an effort to describe America in a series of guidebooks and life histories.

Depression has become the most frequently diagnosed chronic mental illness, and is a disability encountered almost daily by mental health professionals of all trades. "Major Depression" is a medical disease, which some would argue has reached epidemic proportions in contemporary society, and it affects our bodies and brains just like any other disease. Why, this book asks, has the incidence of depression been on such an increase in the last 50 years, if our basic biology hasn't changed as rapidly?

This is the story of hard-scrabble life in rural Oakdale, Nebraska (population 851) starting in the heyday of the 1920s. Chriss Eymann, a newly arrived Swiss immigrant and his wife, Hattie Mae, raised 10 children on the Dust Bowl-ravaged plains during the 1930s in the depths of the Great Depression. But their greatest sacrifice was yet to come: when they sent four young sons off to war in the South Pacific and Europe.

Detroit, mid-1930s: In a city abuzz over its unrivaled sports success, gun-loving baseball fan Dayton Dean became ensnared in the nefarious and deadly Black Legion. The secretive, Klan-like group was executing a wicked plan of terror, murdering enemies, flogging associates, and contemplating armed rebellion. The Legion boasted tens of thousands of members across the Midwest, among them politicians and prominent citizens - even, possibly, a beloved athlete.

During the harshest year of the Great Depression, Lorena Hickok, a top woman news reporter of the day and intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, was hired by FDR’s right-hand man Harry Hopkins to embark upon a grueling journey to the hardest-hit areas of the country to report back on the degree of devastation. Distinguished historian Michael Golay draws on a trove of original sources - including the moving, remarkably intimate, almost daily letters between Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt - as he re-creates that extraordinary journey.

Ed Nebinger was inspired to write these memoirs by his realization of how greatly privileged he had been to be able to grow up in a wonderful part of America during the Great Depression. The Lehigh Valley is a beautiful, fertile area, surrounded by picturesque mountains, and populated by a talented and productive people of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The years he spent growing up in the Pennsylvania steel town of Bethlehem before World War II proved to be pivotal ones in our country's history.

All 15-year-old Kelly McAllister wants to do after high school graduation is attend art school. Academic work isn't important to her. When she studies at the library with her friends, she sometimes talks so much the librarian kicks her out. After her teacher pressures her to start working on her current events paper, Kelly decides she has to take the assignment seriously. The only trouble is she can't think of a topic - until she discovers Mr. Weems, a homeless Vietnam vet who spends his days in the library.

ALA notable author Iain Lawrence pens a moving tale with a Dickensian atmosphere about a young man's life aboard a cruel 19th-century prison ship. 14-year-old Tom Tin is forced to scavenge on the grimy streets of London after his father is sent to debtor's prison. Tom's survival is threatened by the sinister lowlifes that inhabit his hopeless world. But when he is unjustly arrested for murder, he finds a place that is even worse than the dark city streets.

One bright spring morning in the woods of France, a soldier, blinded by the war, is found by a little girl named Coco, and her older sister Marcelle. In return for their kindness, the soldier tells the sisters marvelous tales, each story connected to the keepsake he carries in his pocket: a perfect, tiny, silver donkey.

Your Own, Sylvia draws on Plath’s writing and extensive non-fiction sources, chronicling Hemphill’s interpretation of Plath’s life from infancy to her death by suicide at age 30. The poems are arranged chronologically and each conveys an experience in Plath’s life told via the voice and perspective of family members, friends, doctors, fellow writers, etc. - as interpreted by Hemphill. Each poem is accompanied by an addendum that further explains the factual circumstances of that poem’s subject.

At the height of World War II, LOOK Magazine profiled a small upstate New York community for a series of articles portraying it as the wholesome, patriotic model of life on the home front. Seventy years later, a history teacher tracks down the veterans with a connection to “Hometown, USA” who fought the war in the air over Europe, men who were tempered in the tough times of the Great Depression and forged in battle.

This particular volume (Volume One) begins with the period in the early 1600s when two very different English societies were established in the New World, one in Virginia and one in New England. The Virginia society simply re-created the rigidly class-based feudal society of the times. The New England society was a most unusual democracy of social equals, covenanted to live under God's—not man's—personal rule. These two American social types would find themselves in rather constant struggle....

"McBride’s verse novel, inspired by her father’s life, gets an aural uplift from the accomplished narrator Andre Santana."—School Library Journal (Starred Review) Onyx lives with his mother, who is showing signs of early-onset dementia. He doesn't want to bring attention to his home—if...

A "gorgeous" (New York Times) memoir that braids the evolution of one of America's most iconic branding campaigns with the stirring tales of the women who lived behind its facade - told by the inheritor of their stories. In 1899, Allie Rowbottom's great-great-great-uncle bought the patent to...

This true story took place at the emergency farm-labor camp immortalized in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Ostracized as "dumb Okies," the children of Dust Bowl migrant laborers went without school—until Superintendent Leo Hart and 50 Okie kids built their own school in a nearby field.

Progressivism, the Great Depression, and the New Deal emphasizes economic trends and the role of the government in regard to the economy from the beginning of the twentieth century to America's entry into World War II. The authors discuss the boom of the 1920s, the crash of 1929, the ensuing Depression, and the country's response. Franklin D. Roosevelt's "hundred days" and programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) are examined in detail.