Welcome to The Great Depression: The History of the 1930s Depression. With the Wall Street Crash, the New Deal, and the Rise of Fascism in Europe. The Great Depression of the 1930s was one of the most devastating economic crises in modern history. It brought poverty and despair to millions of people around the world. But it also sparked a wave of innovation, creativity, and resilience that helped shape the future of our world. This book explores...

No society is without crime, prompting Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrator to make his famous statement in The Scarlet Letter that, however high its hopes are, no civilization can fail to allot a portion of its soil as the site of a prison. Crime has also been a prevailing, common theme in films that call us to consider its construction: How do we determine what is lawful and what is criminal? And how, in turn, does this often hypocritical distinction...

John Steinbeck was born in 1902 in California's Salinas River Valley. Although he worked briefly as a reporter in New York, it was in the Salinas Valley that he spent the Depression years, and his experiences and the people he met became the basis for his books. Of Mice and Men opened the eyes of the public to the desperate lives of the migrant workers. The Grapes of Wrath told the story of the destitute Oklahoma dust bowl farmers who flocked to the...

"Like a lot of Americans, Steve Almond spent the weeks after the 2016 election lying awake, in a state of dread and bewilderment. The problem wasn't just the election, but the fact that nobody could explain, in any sort of coherent way, why America had elected a cruel, corrupt, and incompetent man to the Presidency. [This book] is Almond's effort to make sense of our historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the deluge of...

Between 1942 and 1958, J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a sweeping and sustained investigation of the motion picture industry to expose Hollywood's alleged subversion of "the American Way" through its depiction of social problems, class differences, and alternative political ideologies. FBI informants (their names still redacted today) reported to Hoover's G-men on screenplays and screenings of such films as Frank Capra's...

The poor but proud Dunne family and their friends struggle to survive on the dust-plagued prairies of the Oklahoma Panhandle, but discover bitter disappointment in the orchards and vineyards of the so-called promised land of California.

"Brilliant . . . Larry Brown has slapped his own fresh tattoo on the big right arm of Southern Lit." -The Washington Post Book World Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage, directed by David Gordon Green. Joe Ransom is a hard-drinking ex-con pushing fifty who just won't slow down--not in his pickup, not with a gun, and certainly not with women. Gary Jones estimates his own age to be about fifteen. Born luckless, he is the son of...

"The History of Landscape Design in 100 Gardens explores the key moments in garden design. Through profiles of 100 of the most influential gardens, Linda Chisholm explores how social, political, and economic influences shaped garden design principles. The book is organised chronologically and by theme, starting with the medieval garden Alhambra and ending with the modern naturalism of the Lurie Garden. Sumptuously illustrated, The History of Landscape...

In the concluding chapter of Exiles Return Malcolm Cowley had the following comment to make on the 1930s: The 1930s were the Pentecostal years when it seemed that everyone had the gift of tongues and used it to prophesy the millennium. Among the host of writers who seemed to possess this gift, none appeared in the popular imagination to embody it more perfectly than John Steinbeck, whose novels on the marginal workers and dust bowl refugees appeared...