I picked my image because I thought it would be a little bit challenging since it is just a newspaper stand on the side of the street, and because there isn’t much going on in it at first glance. If you look at the newspapers closely it has many bold headlines about big things that were going on in the 1930’s. For example, one headline says, “Roosevelt Asks Ten Billion; Urges Taxes, Spending be Kept Up”, another one states, “Chamberlains Roosevelt’s Attack on Dictatorships”, then another that stood out the most to me was “Olson Spending Plan Blocked”. All these are on the front of the newspaper in big bold letters for anyone walking by to see. These newspaper headings tell us a lot about the history in the 1930’s because it touches on the many plans that Roosevelt would try to put in the New Deal, or even just the government itself, and that it would be shot down because it would go against what the Democrats wanted. 1 The Olson plan was a plan to put government spending down so that the people would be taxed less. One of the many reasons we went into the depression was being taxed so much, although it was not the main cause it played a part in the Depression happening.2 For this picture I wanted to know how this photograph was used to document the things going on the 1930’s. Although it seems like just any newspaper stand and there is nothing popping out or happening its just sitting there. However, if you really look and annualize the picture and read the headlines you can see there was a lot of things going on in the 1930’s (manly focusing on 1936 when the newspaper in the picture was published). The method that intrigued me the most was the Site of production of the creator of the pictures point of view. If I was a photographer back then, walking around with my crazy big camera, I wouldn’t stop and think to take a picture of a newspaper stand. I thought it was interesting to see that photo in a collection with other pictures like Roosevelt signing the declaration of war and giving a farmer a grant for him to farm again, etc. I’ve come to the conclusion that even though things to us now might seem minor back in the 1930’s they were a big deal. The newspaper to us is nothing, but to them it was their form of Social Media. With these methods and trying them out on this picture it really showed me that history has a whole new prospective rather than just something that happened in the past. The new prospective of actually experiencing it in the past.
Below are my two links to the exhibit and the items:
- All Chapters, THE AMERICAN YAWP, 7 June 2013, http://www.americanyawp.com/text/23-the-great-depression/.
- “The Migrant Experience : Articles and Essays : Voices from the Dust Bowl: the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941 : Digital Collections : Library of Congress.” The Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-workers-from-1940-to-1941/articles-and-essays/the-migrant-experience/.
