Great Depression
What different types of evidence do historians use to study the Great Depression? Which types are most valuable? Which are most problematic? What evidence did we not see in this case study that could help us better understand the Great Depression?
The great depression is finally a point in American history where the primary source evidence is becoming more abundant. While there are primary sources for the things we have previously looked at. After WW1 radio and camera recordings started becoming the norm on how to capture first-hand accounts. Historians don't have to make interpretations about words in a book or letter anymore. They can find a recording where you can hear the inflection in a person's voice to understand their emotions about a subject. Because I was interested in seeing if I could find some first-hand accounts from pre-WW1 I logically went to youtube. After some searching, I found a 1999 ABC News piece about slavery that used some recordings of slaves who lived through it. The recordings ABC used were done in 1940 when most people who had been through slavery were well above 90 so the number of people who could give an account of slavery in the first person was limited. While the number of people who lived through the great depression and could and did recall their experience with a recorded interview was much higher. Now that we are in the time period where first-person accounts of these historically significant events are much more widely avalible. We can look for evidence that we don't need to infer what they might have felt or “read between the lines” of an account. If you read the transcripts of the interviews you couldn't hear the emotion in the persons' voice. While watching or listening to an interview you could see the hurt on their face while recalling a memory or the joy a memory brought back at the moment. There are literal hours of recording where you can hear and see these people.
The interview that I happened to watch was one from Washington University, with a man named Lement Harris. In the interview, he talks about several things but if you just read the transcript it’s “flat” and you can't take anything from it.
“ The gas company sent a man out to turn off the gas in a house where a woman and a number of children lived. And when he arrived she was unable to pay the bill. She said, “Please give me time to finish cooking.” He says, “No, I, my instructions are to turn it off right away.” He went into where she was cooking and to his horror, he saw in a basket the head of a dog and then realized that she was cooking a dog for the children as the only food she had in the house.”
Then if you compare that to the actual recording at 4:36 it shows just how this affects Lement.
