Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South

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Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South by Kenneth J. Bindas

Collected over a period of four years in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, these reminiscences from people in rural Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee are primarily concerned with lessons learned. Looking back on their youth, the narrators explore how the Depression defined their lives and their experiences, from subsistence and government assistance, to food and home life, fear and privation. Revealing a common consciousness among people who witnessed profound change and endured, these stories underscore the meaning of collective memory. Their simple tales form the larger story of how the American people continued to rely on the individualistic ethos even as they adopted and accepted the new ideology of social cooperation. Students and scholars of both the 1930s and oral history methodology will welcome this volume.