Back | Exhibit Contents | Continue
How have people’s attachments to their local communities changed over the past century? What aspects of those changes surface in the 1930s and in the Nebraska Writers’ Project?
Martin’s Ranch (#159–Indian attack) C.L. Ray (#283–White settler)
W.A. Potts (#305–Treatment of Indians) C.P. Wiltse (#21–Folklore)
Caesar Ernst (#22–Folklore, humor) Elmer Dellett (#60–Folklore)
Arthur Goodlett (#8 through 10–African-American) Henry W. Black (#100–African-American)
Josiah Waddle (#138–African-American)
Dad Streeter (#278–A narrative about life in Nebraska collected by the Colorado Writers’ Project)Nebraska writer Mari Sandoz once said “the frontier historian is always faced with a great many divergences in the accounts of old timers and eye witnesses long after the fact. Memory plays strange tricks, as do our emotions. We recall what our point of view wants us to recall. Nothing more, or different.” If Sandoz is right, what value do these accounts have? How do you assess the accuracy of these accounts? What other sources might you look at to find out more about events or customs described by these individuals?
If you choose very many of these histories at random, you will discover enormous variation in the interest and quality of these accounts, what might be the reasons for this variation?
In the Great Depression of the 1930s longing for better times caused people to turn away from the present in a variety of ways; some looked at America’s agrarian past with nostalgia, others looked to the future for inspiration. You might investigate some of these trends by looking at the 1930s paintings of Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, (famous regionalist painters), or social realist photography, like Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Try to place what you now know about the Nebraska Federal Writers Project in this context. Look at the pictures and publication covers in this web exhibit in making this assessment.
How much of a person’s identity comes from their possessions, or from the work they do, or reflects their family’s economic prosperity? Would you be the same person if everyone in your family lost their jobs, and you lost your material possessions? If that happened, what about you would remain the same? What would change? Once you have thought about that:
How might the Great Depression have challenged people’s ideas about who they were and how society should work? Considering what you know about other countries in the 1930s, what directions might a reshaping of American’s identities have taken? How did the Writers’ Project address the question of American identity?
Historians often use the word nostalgia as a kind of curse. When we accuse someone of nostalgia, we are suggesting that they belong to the unwashed masses of the ignorant and historically naïve. Look up the word and discuss the following issues: Does nostalgia itself cause us to falsify history? Why or why not? Would it be wrong for writers to deliberately try to evoke the feeling in their readers? Do you find evidence of nostalgia in the work of the Nebraska Federal Writers Project available to you on this website?
Additional information on goals and standards for teachers using these materials.
Back | Exhibit Contents | Continue
A Web Exhibit from The Jane Pope Geske Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors at Lincoln City Libraries. This project was supported in part by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered through the Nebraska Library Commission. Exhibit & Text by Stephen Cloyd. © Lincoln City Libraries, 2007