Melissa Ford is Assistant Professor of History at Slippery Rock University. This interview is based on her new book, A Brick and a Bible: Black Women’s Radical Activism in the Midwest during the Great Depression (Southern Illinois University Press, 2022)....
Great Depression
The Author’s Corner with Mark Monmonier
Mark Monmonier is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University. This interview is based on his new book, Clock and Compass: How John Byron Plato Gave Farmers a Real Address (University of Iowa Press, 2022). JF:...
What did Joe Biden learn from FDR?
He learned that in a time of crisis Americans need direct relief from their national government. Here is historian Suzanne Kahn at The Washington Post: The United States has surpassed an ignominious milestone: 500,000 deaths from covid-19. President Biden has...
What Can We Learn From the Great Depression?
Here is Harvard historian Lizabeth Cohen at The Atlantic: Americans are out of work. More than 20 million lost their jobs in April alone. Lines at food banks stretch for miles. Businesses across the country are foundering. Headlines scream that the coronavirus...
When the Churches Can’t Provide the Social Safety Net That We Need
In the midst of our current pandemic, several historian friends have been referencing Alison Collis Greene‘s book No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta. Greene’s book shows, among other things,...
David Blight: “And the many need government”
One of our finest American historians, Yale’s David Blight, reminds us that Americans have always relied on the government in times of crisis. Here is a taste of his piece at The Atlantic: In August 1861, several months after the secession...
Image of the Day #2
“Reverend Peter Marshall, Pastor of New York Presbyterian Church, preaching sunrise service at Fort Lincoln Heights on Bladensburg Road, Washington D.C., April 1942.” Source...
Calvin Coolidge Stumps for Herbert Hoover
1932: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjnXr6gCM9k] From British Pathe videos...