Slugburgers, hamburgers in which the meat has been supplemented with bread, meal, or crackers for filler, come from a triangular region that cuts across northern Alabama, northern Mississippi, and southern Tennessee and roughly corresponds with the Tennessee Valley. They're called slugburgers in Moulton, Alabama; Decatur, Alabama; and Corinth, Mississippi; doughburgers in Tupelo, Mississippi; and breadburgers in Cullman, Alabama. This regional take on the hamburger became popular during the Great Depression, when the price of meat made it necessary to use fillers to extend supply. Though the exact origin of the term is disputed, it is most commonly held that Slugburgers got their name from the coin used to pay for them: when each burger cost 5¢, you could pay for one with a nickel which was then also called a slug. Corinth, Mississippi, has held an annual Slugburger Festival since 1988. Take a photographic tour of the Slugburger Trail. [more inside]
posted by ocherdraco on Sep 18, 2009 - 78 comments

Slang in the Great Depression. Less'n you're a dumbcluck, you're gonna open up that bazoo and speak the language taught John Swartzwelder everything he knows. [more inside]
posted by ford and the prefects on Aug 31, 2009 - 20 comments

In Our Own Backyard: Resisting Nazi Propaganda In Southern California 1933 - 1945, a digital exhibition from the Oviatt Library at Cal State Northridge. "The Nazi Propaganda period, 1933 to 1945, chronicles a crucial twelve years in American history. This exhibit's story about the local threat to American ideals demonstrates how European events reached across the ocean and affected people in Southern California -- in our own backyard." Magazines, pamphlets, newspapers, stickers and more. [more inside]
posted by dersins on Apr 10, 2009 - 33 comments

Quit Lying About Roosevelt! "Amity Shlaes, the GOP's Great Depression philosopher-queen, couldn't be more dangerously wrong." [Via]
posted by homunculus on Mar 9, 2009 - 36 comments

Feeling the pinch? Ninety-something Clara Cannucciari can teach you how to survive the lean times. In a series of YouTube videos directed by her great grandson, Clara reminisces about the Great Depression ("I had to quit high school because I couldn't afford socks!"), and provides cooking tips on such Depression-era fare as Pasta with Peas (6:32), Egg Drop Soup (6:52), Poorman's Meal (6:50), Peppers and Eggs (Part 1, 5:41; Part 2, 5:47), Bread (4:08), and Depression Breakfast (6:13). [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie on Feb 19, 2009 - 26 comments

What was it like during the Great Depression? University of Oregon Economist Mark Thoma links to interviews by Studs Terkel which deal with the Great Depression. All interviews in Real Player format. Interviewees: Gardner C. Means, economic adviser to FDR. Peggy Terry, a migrant farm worker (my favorite interview). Virginia Durr, civil rights activist. Ed Paulsen, dayworker. Emma Tiller, cook. Pauline Kael (yes, that Pauline Kael). Mary Owsley, farm worker. Much more in the Hard Times section of the wonderful Studs Terkel website, which has been featured twice previously on MetaFilter (1, 2) [via Obsidian Wings]
posted by Kattullus on Sep 29, 2008 - 30 comments

Book of Short Stories :: Short stories written by New York State 5th graders in 1931. (Be sure to read the About page to get a sense of the setting of the times.) (via Thingamababy)
posted by anastasiav on Sep 22, 2008 - 20 comments

The 'Dirty Thirties' saw farmers hit with the double-whammy of the Great Depression and the ecological disaster of the Dust bowl years. "In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered 203 families from the hardest-hit areas of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan the chance to start fresh in a new land, in a fertile Alaskan valley with the melodic name Matanuska." "It was heady, fine-sounding stuff on paper. Picked from relief rolls in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, the prospective colonists knew their Promised Land was a wilderness, but the Government was going to turn the wilderness overnight into an Eden with running water, radios, a cinema. It was going to set each family up on fine 40-acre farms with every necessity, many a luxury, 30 years to pay." It didn't quite work out as well as they'd hoped.thirties' saw many farmers in the United States [more inside]
posted by merelyglib on Sep 10, 2008 - 33 comments

Songs that clearly and directly address or reference economic hardships and injustice in America, not to mention that do so in a bitter, regretful tone, don't often become enormous hits. Matter of fact, it's such a rare phenomenon that you could count such songs on... um, one finger? Yes, Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney's iconic Brother Can You Spare a Dime is that song. Covered by a surprisingly wide range of singers through the years, the song still resonates. [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite on May 10, 2008 - 55 comments

Hank Stuever's 3000-word Washington Post article thinks about the Depression and what it means to the U.S. now. via Snarkmarket
posted by cgc373 on Feb 10, 2008 - 25 comments

"The storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal. The canal took seven years to dig; the storm lasted a single afternoon. More than 300,000 tons of Great Plains topsoil was airborne on that day."
Black Sunday. April 14, 1935. Timeline, Oral Histories (Kansas, Nebraska), Dust Bowl Movie (part I, part II), Black Sunday photos (1, 2, 3, 4). [previous dust on mefi: iraq, texas, africa, china]
posted by jessamyn on Aug 26, 2007 - 17 comments

The comic-opera Huey Long: Journalist, teacher, legal advisor to the abortive American-Indian-run state of Sequoyah, ‘Alfalfa Bill’ Murray (wiki) ran Dust Bowl Oklahoma with an iron fist - calling out the National Guard forty-seven times in four years and setting off a three-day armed standoff with the state of Texas. In 1932, his “Bread, Butter, Bacon, and Beans” Presidential platform was so badly eclipsed by The New Deal, his delegates officially threw their votes to a joke candidate (balloting). Unlike his fellow Depression-era populists, Murray continued as a public figure post-war, campaigning for worker’s rights, the United Nations, segregation, exporting the Jews to Madagascar, and winning the Cold War by putting ethnic Russians in internment camps. Seventy-five years on, he was honored by the Oklahoma legislature for the only bit that actually mattered, aretheyrite?
posted by ormondsacker on May 20, 2007 - 7 comments

Teenage Hoboes in the Great Depression. During the Great Depression over 250,000 young people left home and began riding freight trains or hitchhiking across America. Most of them were between 16 and 25 years of age. Many finally found work and shelter through the Civilian Conservation Corps, a government relief project that Franklin D. Roosevelt established in 1933 as part of the New Deal. From 1933 to 1942, CCC enrollees built new roads, strung telephone wires, erected fire towers, and planted approximately 3 billion trees. By 1935, the program was providing employment for more than 500,000 young men.
posted by matteo on Jul 7, 2006 - 25 comments

The New Deal Network from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute has articles, photographs, and other collections of material about the Great Depression and the New Deal. There are selections from the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers Project, an account of the Harlan County mine wars from John Dos Passos, and enough stuff to waste time keep busy for days.
posted by dilettante on Feb 23, 2006 - 8 comments

A speculative bubble is created when objectivity, reasoning, and valuation give way to greed and an insatiable desire for profits. On this date in history... October 29, 1929: The date of the stock market crash that marked the start of the Great Depression in the United States. Could it have been averted by the reading of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay?
posted by puddsharp on Oct 29, 2002 - 21 comments