Roadside America

Slight modification to the syllabus:

For Tues 9/29 Reading: 1) Brown, “Route 66” (PDF on Blackboard) and 2) Hamilton’s Itinerarium (PDF on Blackboard). Try applying the techniques, questions, and critical thinking skills to Hamilton’s document from the handout I provided on Thursday. For those who missed Thursday’s class, the handout was the text slides from this presentation:

Thurs 10/1 Workshop Day: How to Read a Photograph, using Okies on the Mother Road as a case study

Some of the most iconic American images of traveling and roadside life come from displaced migrants of the Great Depression in the 1930s, in part because of the efforts of New Deal documentarians from the Works Progress Administration, the Farm Security Administration, and (a little later) the Office of Wartime Information. We’ll use some of this material to explore how to read a photograph or a visual image (such as posters or advertisements) as a historical text. Our online sources are the photographs from the New Deal Network, and the Library Of Congress/FSA-OWI. During this workshop, take a look at these two collections and get familiar with how to use them and search within them. We’ll be using some of the images that display roadside culture of migrants, refugees, and Okies in the 1930s as the primary sources for History Lab #2.