03/21/11

The Depressed Economy and Happy Food

(Picture from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.)

During the Great Depression most were very poor and could barely afford food which they needed to survive. The picture shows a very long food line in New York City. In the video I have chosen Clara who lived through the great depression showed us how her mom made pizza. On nights when mom made bread she will take a piece of the bread dough and they will have dinner for the night. Their budget conscious pizza makes my pizza look very high class. My first cooking book actually was a book full of recipes from the Great Depression era and I notice that they try to substitute anywhere they can for cheaper products and they used lard to replace butter and oil. I feel like the messages that these two sources communicate about the Depression is that although times where tough people still found away to make it thru and they looked forward to the little things like the way Clara describes about how her family gathered around the lamp.

02/19/11

Immigration To The New World

These two images portray the lives of Italian immigrants in the early 1900s. Both images depict their living conditions in the 1900s. The image on the left shows the bedroom of an Italian family. Judging from the image, the family may be from a lower class because their living condition seems poor, cramped and unsanitary. However comparing this image to the one on the right, they are complete opposites from one another. The image on the right shows a much well off family probably in the middle class. The breadwinner in this family may have been a scholar, allowing him to have a higher paying job compared to other immigrant families with low education back then.