Download PDF The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America, by T. H. Watkins
Why must be The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins in this website? Get a lot more revenues as exactly what we have told you. You can locate the various other eases besides the previous one. Ease of getting guide The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins as what you desire is also offered. Why? We offer you many sort of guides that will not make you feel bored. You can download them in the web link that we supply. By downloading The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins, you have taken the proper way to choose the ease one, compared with the problem one.
The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America, by T. H. Watkins
Download PDF The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America, by T. H. Watkins
This is it guide The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins to be best seller lately. We offer you the best offer by obtaining the amazing book The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins in this website. This The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins will certainly not only be the kind of book that is difficult to locate. In this internet site, all types of books are provided. You could browse title by title, author by writer, and also author by publisher to learn the most effective book The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins that you could read now.
In some cases, checking out The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins is extremely boring and also it will take very long time starting from getting guide and start checking out. However, in modern-day period, you could take the establishing technology by utilizing the internet. By web, you can visit this web page and also start to look for the book The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins that is needed. Wondering this The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins is the one that you require, you can choose downloading. Have you comprehended how to get it?
After downloading the soft data of this The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins, you can start to review it. Yeah, this is so delightful while someone must check out by taking their large publications; you remain in your brand-new way by just manage your device. And even you are operating in the office; you can still make use of the computer to review The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins totally. Naturally, it will certainly not obligate you to take numerous pages. Just page by page depending upon the moment that you have to check out The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins
After knowing this quite simple method to read as well as get this The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins, why don't you tell to others concerning by doing this? You can tell others to visit this site and choose browsing them favourite publications The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins As known, below are bunches of listings that provide numerous type of books to collect. Simply prepare couple of time and web connections to obtain the books. You can really take pleasure in the life by checking out The Hungry Years: A Narrative History Of The Great Depression In America, By T. H. Watkins in a quite straightforward fashion.
It was the worst of times and the best of times. It was an era of unprecedented crisis and a time of unprecedented courage. In a single, comprehensive volume, The Hungry Years tells the story of the Great Depression through the eyes of the people who lived it. Less concerned with the power brokers in Washington than with the daily struggles of ordinary people at the grassroots across America, it draws on little-known oral histories, memoirs, local press, and scholarly monographs to capture the voices of men and women in a time of extreme crisis. The result is a richly detailed narrative that traces the stages of the disaster chronologically without losing touch with the personal wounds it inflicted or the ways in which people responded.
Humane and compassionate, brilliantly researched, full of story and anecdote, The Hungry Years puts the reader at the very heart of the maelstrom that was the American depression.
- Sales Rank: #1084240 in Books
- Color: Grey
- Brand: Brand: Holt Paperbacks
- Published on: 2000-09-01
- Released on: 2000-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x 1.35" w x 5.50" l, 1.70 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 608 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
The late 1920s were a strange moment in American history: a time when it seemed possible for peace to reign around the world, with the United States as its supreme enforcer, a time when, as T.H. Watkins writes, "instant gratification in the matter of clothes and gadgets and even automobiles bloated consumer credit" and when speculation on the stock market reached rampant, unsettling highs. The moment ended in the failure of the market, then of the banks, and finally of the whole economy, leading to a massive depression that would last for a decade.
Published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the crash, The Hungry Years offers a sweeping history of those terrible times. Watkins is slow to lay blame but quick to praise. He credits, for instance, the much-maligned Herbert Hoover, the president under whose watch the depression began, for his efforts in attempting to contain the widespread psychological damage that economic hardship wrought. He also offers a sometimes critical but generally appreciative account of the massive federal programs that the Roosevelt administration put in place to revive the economy--programs often characterized as giving working men only shovels on which to lean. But more important, he praises ordinary Americans for looking beyond immediate self-interest to find ways to help one another--and these ordinary Americans are the real heroes of Watkins's vigorous and exemplary historical narrative. --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
An entire library of books exists on various aspects of the Depression in America. It is therefore a daunting challenge to build something fresh and worthwhile using the well-worn facts and interpretations that form the bedrock of this literature. Montana State University's Watkins (Righteous Pilgrim, etc.) rises to the occasion, artfully assembling carefully selected anecdotes to deliver a brilliant, ground-level portrait of America as it struggled through the long and painful decade of the 1930s. Watkins makes good use of obscure memoirs, oral histories and local press clippings, taking readers deep into the lives of men and women (sharecroppers, auto workers, lumberjacks, students) as they navigated the catastrophe. People had various techniques for coping with the crisis. Some of the techniques were ingenious, many more were pitiful and some were downright evil. Watkins documents the search for scapegoats, especially the rise of virulent anti-Semitism propounded most notably by radio demagogue Father Charles Coughlin. And he elegantly portrays the radicalization of the masses and the rise of the American Communist Party. Exhaustive, eloquent and engaging, Watkins's graceful narrative simultaneously paints a panoramic picture of America and delves, with great understanding and sympathy, into the details of individual lives. No one with an interest in 20th-century American history can afford to miss it. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
One reason the years 1929-39 are known as the Great Depression is that so many Americans became deeply dispirited; some people came to question the fundamentals of a society where things had gone so awry, though others were able to rekindle hope. That's the story Watkins tells here. Largely a sweeping synthesis based on extant historical literature, this book explores how everyday Americans across the country coped with economic disaster. If the story seems somewhat familiar, Watkins, whose previous writings include Righteous Pilgrim, a much-praised biography of Harold Ickes, infuses it with a freshness that makes for compelling reading. Of course, there are reservations. Not everyone suffered during the Depression; nor do we hear much about the diversion provided by popular culture, notably radio and professional sports. These quibbles aside, readers with an eye for vivid narrative will enjoy this lively journey through 1930s America. Recommended for public and academic libraries.ABrooks D. Simpson, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
52 of 55 people found the following review helpful.
Left Me Feeling Hungry
By Gerard Hildebrand
This should be my type of book: Serious history written for the general reader. The book provides statistics, anecdotes, political history, union history, Dust Bowl history, and it discusses the alphabet soup of Depression programs and the 1929 crash. Somehow all of this never comes into focus. There isn't a clear narrative. For example, we don't learn that the farm economy was depressed throughout the 1920's until page 340 or so--after Watkins had already discussed the causes of the Depression and after another section that took us up to the end of the thirties.
Watkins could do some fact checking as well. He says that the 1935 Social Security Act "did establish an unemployment and disability insurance program financed by a tax on employers--to be collected by the states, then distributed as unemployment or disability payments to those who qualified under state-established standards." The SSA did establish the unemployment insurance program, but a similar disability insurance program has never been created. It wasn't for lack of trying. Senator Wagner, who introduced the SSA in the Senate in 1935, introduced a bill to establish a Federal-State disability program in 1939, but he didn't succeed in seeing it enacted. (As of today only California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island have disability insurance programs which pay benefits to workers who cannot work due to a non-work related disability.)
Watkins also claims that FDR's 1936 electoral victory "was greater than in any election since that of James Madison in 1820". James Monroe won the 1820 election.
But Watkins greatest failure is that he does not place many events in context. The Great Depression created the world we live in today - the Federal legislation on banking, securities, unemployment insurance, welfare, social security are treated with less emphasis than all the programs that came in and went in the Depression (the WPA, CCC, NRA). Yes, we should pay witness to those who lived through the Depression, but we should also pay witness to the world they created.
32 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Pretty weak
By A Customer
This book is certainly not a 'narrative history of the great depression.' Its scope is very narrowly focused on a short list of topics, most prominent of which are various union organizing drives. Unless you have some incredible interest in hearing basically the same story over and over again, this gets boring quickly. And all the glowing comments about the contributions of the Communist Party to the effort and to life during the 30's in general are just bizarre.
The author's economic knowledge is clearly very limited. There is absolutely nothing here about bank runs and the collapse of the credit system that lay at the root of the depression. And his attempts to scale various nominal numbers to current day values by simply using a price deflator don't take into account that people were a lot poorer then and the economy a lot smaller, so even expressed in real dollars the amounts in question are puny by modern standards. This clearly calls for framing everything in percentage change terms, which the author doesn't do.
Finally, as far as I could tell, there was little or no original research here. A "Narrative" history ought to at least entail the author's listening to some narratives from people around during the period. Instead almost all of the cited sources are popular histories and biographies about the period, which gives the book the tone more of a book report or term paper than a serious piece of history.
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
skilled narrative history at its lyrical, absorbing best
By Bruce J. Wasser
We live in an era in which politicians of both major parties try to outdo each other in their denunciations of government. President Reagan provided the verbal apotheosis of this anti-goverrnmental attitude, and his accolyte, George W. Bush, a political insider if there ever was one, continues the cynical and insidious calculated assault on the nature of government and its relationship with the people. Many Americans today feel a profound alienation from government and truly believe their interests are contradictory of those of government. T. H. Watkins, author of the elegant, compelling and profound history of the Great Depression, "The Hungry Years" must wince every time he hears these voices. Professor Watkins knows of another time in our past, one of great social dislocation and mass suffering; one where men and women yearned for work and from work, hope; one where the threads which bound us together as a nation were slowly, but steadily, fraying. His remarkably beautiful and tremendously affecting work stands as a reminder that there was a time in our not too distant past where one man, crippled and conflicted himself, sought to alleviate that suffering in a program which would redefine a citizen's relationship with his or her national government.
"The Hungry Years" above all serves as a philosophical keystone that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal sought to change governmental indifference into governmental action, attempted to create a symbiotic and caring relationship between the common person and government, and served to remind all Americans that activism in the name of justice and dignity is a pivotal characteristic in our national character. Watkins clearly analyzes the myriad of dreams, laws, acts, decisions and outcomes of the New Deal, and he is frank in discussing shortfalls and disappointments. Underlying the discussion, however, is his unabashed admiration for the tenor of the early years of FDR's adminstration. "For a time, millions of Americans -- white, black, and brown, male and female, urban and rural, young and old, white-collar and blue-collar -- had been given a sense of their own worth and power, the notion that by joining together they could control at least some portion of their lives, however imperfectly, however briefly."
This admirable volume rings with authenticity, primarily because the author so assiduously assembled anecdotes and interviews with those directly affected by the Great Depression. Human voices, laden with sadness and anger, ringing with rage at loss and suffering and growling with the ominous timbre of class war, appear on every page. These voices, magnificently interstitched with careful research (even his footnotes are written gracefully), control the book and serve to focus our attention on the human consequences of the era. Each chapter could stand on its own, but I found his discussion of artists, actors and writers in the New Deal absolutely rivetting, as were his astounding accounts of the impact of natural disaster on the geographic and emotional landscape of the land.
"The Hungry Years" will serve as an important example that history can read as literature and move readers in the same way as art. Satisfying intellectually and emotionally, "The Hungry Years" inspires historical imagination and furnishes us with a vision of a society not at odds with government, but aligned with a President who perceived that government's most serious and honored obligation is to alleviate suffering.
The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America, by T. H. Watkins PDF
The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America, by T. H. Watkins EPub
The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America, by T. H. Watkins Doc
The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America, by T. H. Watkins iBooks
The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America, by T. H. Watkins rtf
The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America, by T. H. Watkins Mobipocket
The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America, by T. H. Watkins Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar