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Learn about Arkansas during the Great Depression at this virtual exhibit by the Old State House Museum. Take a pictorial journey back in time to experience the Great Depression as it occurred for many Arkansas people.
The crash of the stock market in 1929 signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. It was followed in 1930 and 1931 by one of the worst droughts in the country’s history. The plight of displaced sharecroppers and poor farmers, devastated by this set of circumstances in the heartland of America, captured the sympathy of the entire nation and helped set the stage for the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”
No branch of the New Deal was more radical than the Department of Agriculture under Henry Wallace; and no program more controversial than his effort to resettle the dispossessed in government-sponsored co-operatives and collective farms. To win sympathy for such measures, Wallace hired Roy Stryker to establish a photography bureau to document the plight of the rural poor in the nation’s “Dust Bowl.”
From 1935 to 1940, Farm Security Administration photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn took hundreds of photographs in Arkansas. Collectively those photographs constitute an amazing record of extraordinary times. The Old State House Museum has tried to assemble the very best of those images in this special Web exhibit.
The photo captions duplicate the photographer’s notes that appear in the original FSA records —sentence fragments included. Additional information and editorial comments are placed within parentheses.
Also learn about Arkansas slavery at the exhibit titled "Them Dark Days": The Arkansas Slave Narratives.
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