Originally, my historical question focused on crime rates and the type of crimes during the New Deal Era. My question was “How did crime alter during the New Deal?” I had some initial ideas to answer this question like that crime rate would be extremely high. I assumed many people were starving and couldn’t afford a place to live. This usually leads to extremely high theft rates and vandalism crimes. Many parents would steal food just to provide for their family or rob someone of their money, so they could buy food or a place for their family to stay. Usually, small petty crime can lead to more complex and violent crime including assault, armed robbery, and murder.
Personally, when searching for sources, I didn’t filter by location or time period. I focused on articles and narratives that mentioned crime or had a person discussing their own experience with crime and violence in their life. I also looked through the details about each narrative and some mentioned topics such as violence or gangs and I thought it was important to include those in my research.
I think Voyant Tools can be extremely helpful for finding connections and ideas among multiple different sources. This was evident when I used the entire corpus, centered around the 1930’s, to find the common themes among all the readings. This included almost every source focusing on family and the importance of keeping together and trying to survive. Even when the government wasn’t helping to feed and house them. 1 I think the cirrus and trends are two very important tools for people to easily find these connections within the readings. It is also helpful to be able to be connected to the reading through the trends tab. I found it more important to use sources that ranged during the 1930’s, so I only used sources that fell between 1930-1939. I wanted to possibly see the progression during this time period.
After using Voyant Tools, I decided to refine my question to “How did crime affect citizens during the 1930’s?” I think it became very obvious after using this tools to see that family was very important and a lot of crime occurred over protecting the family. I found that many articles included topics on informants. This usually includes normal citizens reporting information to higher organizations such as law enforcement. After looking through some narratives, I found there was a lot of theft and people were fighting with native Americans at the time. It is also interesting that school seems to be very important at this time when families were struggling to make money and provide. Especially when the government was helping to put people to work, it seems weird they would send children to school. 2
Lastly, it seems that crime and violence are correlated with this time period. When survival is most important, people are more likely to commit crime to provide for themselves and others. This includes, robbery, theft, and murder etc. I also think text analysis is very important to make connections and correlation among topics.
- “America Eats: Pioneers of Food Writing.” Single Explore Essay | What America Ate. Accessed November 1, 2019. https://whatamericaate.org/single.essay.php?kid=79-2CB-E.
- “Introduction : Articles and Essays : American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940 : Digital Collections : Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress. Accessed November 1, 2019. https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-writers-project/articles-and-essays/introduction/.
