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Sources from the Library of Congress

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Primary Sources

Click the thumbnail for the original item, the caption for information on the item, or download a PDF or MP3.

The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

To download audio and video players go to American Memory: How to View

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The Dust Bowl devastated the Great Plains and sent many families on the road in search of a better life. Recorded music, song lyrics and photographs, including Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother", document the daily ordeals of rural migrant families during a decade marked by both the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

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Photo collection from PBS

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In April 1936 a young photographer named Arthur Rothstein showed up in Boise City to take photographs for the federal government's Resettlement Administration.

Rothstein's boss, Roy Stryker, believed that pictures could be a powerful tool to show not only the multitude of problems the nation was facing, but what the government was doing about them.

Over the course of seven years, as the agency became part of the Farm Security Administration, Stryker would launch an unprecedented documentary effort, eventually amassing more than 200,000 images of America in the 1930s taken by a talented cadre of photographers, including Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Marion Post Walcott, John Vachon, and Dorothea Lange.
Click on the thumbnail images below to view the full photos.

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THE DUST BOWL chronicles the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history, in which the frenzied wheat boom of the 'Great Plow-Up,' followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation.

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Time Magazine's photo collection

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For some, the phrase "Dust Bowl" conjures a place: the Great Plains, but a Great Plains of abandoned homes, ruined lives, dead and dying crops and sand, sand, sand.

For others, the phrase denotes not a region but an era: the mid- to late-1930s in America, when countless farms were lost; dust storms raced across thousands of miles of once-fertile land, so huge and unremitting that they often blotted out the sun; and millions of American men, women and children took to the road, leaving behind everything they knew and everything they'd built, heading west, seeking work, food, shelter, new lives, new hope.

These families, immortalized in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and in the unflinching photographs of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and others, were almost universally known as "Okies," whether or not they actually hailed from the devastated state of Oklahoma. The great, ragged migration away from half-buried farms and toward California and other vague "promised lands" is one of the defining catastrophes of the Great Depression. To this day, the very term Okie conjures images of gaunt men, grim women and doomed children dressed in tattered clothes, traveling by foot or jalopy across a landscape that seems perpetually dry, flat and ruined.

But just as entire families in Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Nebraska and other states abandoned their homes in search of a new start, countless other farmers held their own, suffering through the very worst of the Dust Bowl years, battling for every ear of corn, every grain of wheat, every leaf of lettuce on farms they had worked, in some cases, for generations.

Here, as massive, frightening droughts in California, Texas and elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad continue unabated, LIFE.com offers a series of revealing photos - most of which never ran in LIFE magazine - by the great Alfred Eisenstaedt. These pictures don't follow "Okies" as they leave their world behind. Instead, Eisenstaedt's photos chronicle the hardscrabble existence of Oklahoma farmers who stayed: families who fought to keep their livelihoods and their homesteads during those lean, unforgiving years after the Dust Bowl - according to the history books, at least - came to an end.
-- Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

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For some, the phrase "Dust Bowl" conjures a place: the Great Plains, but a Great Plains of abandoned homes, ruined lives, dead and dying crops and sand, sand, sand.

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Sources from the Library of Congress

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Primary Source Sets - The Great Depression - Themed Resources | Teacher Resources - Library of Congress

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A compilation of Great Depression related primary source sets from across the Library's Web site

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Primary sources from the Digital Public Library of America

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The 1929 stock market crash triggered a massive economic downturn that would plague not only the United States but also other nations for many years. The prosperity of the 1920s had not been widely shared, with half of all American families living at or below the poverty line even before the market crash. As banks failed and unemployment soared to 25 percent, the resulting economic devastation plunged countless Americans into poverty, leaving some homeless and many standing in breadlines. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932, he promised a "New Deal." The programs established by his administration, ranging from the Works Progress Administration to Social Security, would greatly expand the responsibilities and power of the federal government, giving rise to the modern welfare state. This source set allows you to explore the crisis of the Great Depression, as well as the dramatic developments of the New Deal, through photographs, speeches, letters, and oral histories.

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The 1929 stock market crash triggered a massive economic downturn that would plague not only the United States but also other nations for many years. The prosperity of the 1920s had not been widely shared, with half of all American families living at or below the poverty line even before the market crash.

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President FDR's Fireside Chat on the banking crisis

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President FDR's Fireside Chat on the banking crisis

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President FDR's Fireside Chat on the New Deal

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President FDR's Fireside Chat on the New Deal

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Collection of documents from FDR's first 100 days as President

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Collection of documents from FDR's first 100 days as President