What Did the Great Depression Look Like Here? The FSA/OWI Photographic Collection and State and Local History
Lecture Description
This lecture covers the 1935-43 collection of 180,000 photographs in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division of the 48 United States and Puerto Rico known as the “Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information ” or FSA/OWI photographs. Schulz discusses the importance of these photographs not just for understanding the impact of the great depression of the 1930s and then the shift to wartime production in the late 1930s / early 1940s upon ordinary American people, but also the window that these photographs can provide into ordinary people living and working in specific localities. Lecture can be focused on the specific local and state history of the community for the lecture, but will also cover how ordinary citizens today can see and search these photographs online for historic images of places they know and love or remember. The talk begins with an overview of the agency and of the photographers who worked in the particular location and is heavily illustrated with slides and images from the FSA/OWI collection at the Library of Congress.