Education Portal for Students in India

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Education is about learning skills and knowledge, It also means helping people to learn how to do things and support them to think about what they learn. It is also important for educators to teach ways to find and use information. Education may help and guide individuals from one class to another. Educated people and groups can do things like help less-educated people and encourage them to get educated. A school class with a sleeping schoolmaster, oil on panel painting by Jan Steen, 1672
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What happened to the children during the Great Depression?

Children of the 1930s were subject to child labor reform measures of the 1920s, which limited their workday to 8 hours, and provided guidelines for employment of minors. Many children were self-employed, collecting junk to sell or doing odd jobs for neighbors.
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What ended the Great Depression for kids?

History >> The Great Depression When did the Great Depression end? The Great Depression didn’t just end one day and everything was all better. The exact date when the Great Depression ended is much debated by historians and economists, Most people put the “start of the end” at the beginning of World War II in 1939. What caused it to end? Even more debated is what caused the Great Depression to end. Most historians point to World War II, When the war began, factories went back to full production building war supplies such as tanks, airplanes, ships, guns, and ammunition. Unemployment dropped as young men joined the army and people went to work in the factories. Other people give credit to the New Deal programs of the 1930s for ending the depression. No doubt, there were a lot of factors that helped to get the U.S. economy going again. World War II, government regulations, a new banking system, and the end of the drought in the Midwest all contributed to the recovery of the economy. Legacy The Great Depression left a lasting legacy on the people and the government of the United States. Many people who lived through the era distrusted banks and no longer would buy goods using credit. They bought things with cash and stored emergency rations in their basement. Other people felt that the depression made them and the country stronger. It taught people about hard work and survival. The New Deal The many agencies and laws passed by the New Deal changed the country forever. The New Deal changed the way people thought about the role of the government. Perhaps the most important new law was the Social Security Act. This act (through a payroll tax) provided retirement for the elderly, assistance to the disabled, and unemployment insurance. It is still a major part of the government today. Other New Deal programs that impact our lives today include banking reform (like FDIC insurance which keeps your money at the bank safe), stock market regulations (to keep companies from lying about their profits), farm programs, housing programs, and laws protecting and regulating unions. Public Works The works programs, such as the WPA, the PWA, and the CCC, did more than just provide jobs to the unemployed, they left a lasting mark on the country. The WPA (Works Progress Administration) alone built over 5,000 new schools, 1,000 libraries, 8,000 parks, over 650,000 miles of new roads, and built or repaired over 124,000 bridges. Many of these schools, parks, bridges, libraries, and roads are still used today. This infrastructure helped the U.S. economy for decades to come. Interesting Facts About the End and Legacy of the Great Depression

The CCC planted almost 3 billion trees throughout the country. The Fair Labor Standards Act gave us the forty-hour week, the minimum wage, and established regulations on child labor. The WPA also installed over 16,000 miles of new water lines. In 1934, the FDIC began insuring up to $2,500 in bank deposits. Today the FDIC insures up to $250,000 in deposits.

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More About the Great Depression Works Cited History >> The Great Depression
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What were schools like in the 1930s UK?

Childhood in the 1920s and 1930s What was it like to be a child in the 1920s and 1930s? What was it like to go to school and what games did children play in the inter-war period? Life in the 1920s and 1930s, the era of the Great Depression, was difficult for many families.

• The affluence of the middle and upper classes was in stark contrast to the abject poverty experienced by families dealing with unemployment, slum housing and deprivation.
• However schooling was compulsory for all children, from the age of 5 until the age of 14, when most children left school to enter the world of work, or to stay at home and help look after younger siblings.

Out of school hours, many children helped with household chores, ran errands and looked after the younger ones in the family as families tended to be much larger in the 1920s. Fee-paying pupils or those at grammar school had the option of staying on at school until the age of 18. Classroom, 1920s Many smaller schools did not have the facilities to offer school dinners in the 1920s and 1930s, so in the winter children would bring in a large potato to school, with their initials carved into the skin, to be baked for them in the school coal-oven.

• In summer pupils would bring sandwiches.
• Children who lived nearby would often go home for lunch.
• Some school boards offered free school meals to children from poorer families but these were not available everywhere.
• Teaching was by rote: ‘chalk and talk’.
• There was an emphasis on the three R’s – reading, writing and arithmetic – but there was also nature study, singing and weekly country dancing lessons.

Sewing, knitting, woodwork and cookery lessons were taught to older pupils as well as a Personal Hygiene class once a week. In smaller country schools, it was not unusual for pupils to begin to learn to write using trays of sand and a stick, later graduating to a chalk board before having access to more expensive pencils and paper. School Outing, c.1935 Toys and games were very simple for those growing up in the 1920s and 1930s. Most children played out on the streets as there were few cars around. Whip and top was very popular – although a little awkward to play if your street was cobbled! Tops were often made from wood, but carrot tops and turnip tops worked just as well.

• Hopscotch was fun, as well as skipping; Double Dutch was a particular favourite although it required long ropes.
• In summer, was the street game of choice and of course, football was played all year round.
• In autumn it would be,
• At weekends and during school holidays, often children would go out to play after breakfast and not return until supper time.

To our modern eyes, this seems very unsafe as children were not supervised and quite often their parents had little idea where they were. Most children however escaped harm, apart from a few bumps, bruises and grazed knees! Comics were popular and published on a weekly basis. ‘The School Friend’ comic for girls Other boys’ comics included “The Boy’s Own Paper”, a mix of adventure stories, sport, puzzles and games. There was also “The Champion”, starring such characters as Rockfist Rogan (a RAF Pilot and boxer) and Colwyn Dane (a detective).

• Other popular comics included “The Wizard” and “Hotspur”.
• The Beano” and “The Dandy” were first published in the late 1930s.
• Sweets were cheap enough to be bought with pocket money.
• Sally Cook was born in 1922 and grew up in Leeds, Yorkshire: “I had a halfpenny to spend each day which was nearly always squandered on a chocolate caramel bar.

The sweet shop on the corner opposite my primary school had the most glorious selection of sweets you can imagine: Black Jacks, Fruit Salads, liquorice sticks, lemonade crystals, telephone wires, everlasting strips, acid drops, gob stoppers, aniseed balls and some sticky sweets that could be bought for halfpenny an ounce. Birthday party, mid 1930s Other childhood pastimes included listening to the wireless, board games such as Ludo and Snakes and Ladders, playing with toy trains (Hornby), toy aeroplanes, dolls and dolls houses. Boys and girls could also join the Cubs, Brownies, Boy or Girl Scouts.

1. Trips to the cinema were very popular.
2. However childhood was not all fun and games.
3. In the 1920s and 1930s children had to contend with not only all the usual childhood diseases such as mumps and whooping cough, but also diphtheria and scarlet fever.
4. Children with diphtheria or scarlet fever were sent to isolation hospitals – fever hospitals – often for months at a time.

Polio, rickets and TB were also prevalent, especially amongst the poor, and often led to physical disability. It was a common sight to see children who had had polio in calipers right up until the 1960s. The advent of war in 1939 led to thousands of children being evacuated from Britain’s cities and towns into the countryside. : Childhood in the 1920s and 1930s
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What caused the Great Depression middle school?

The Great Depression was a devastating economic time when many Americans lost everything. This was because of the stock market crash, people overspending, a lack of credit, and a horrible drought. It took many years for Americans to recover from this event.
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Did people have babies during the Great Depression?

What’s behind the falling U.S. birthrate?

FACULTY Q&A Fertility rates in the United States have hit an all-time low—and have cratered since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Pamela Smock, a research professor in the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and a professor of sociology, discusses how the blend of changing social attitudes, a changing economy, family policies and times of stress and grief have impacted the U.S.

birthrate and what that means for the country. How long have we seen a declining birthrate in the United States? It’s been more than several years. While we did see low fertility rates during the Great Depression of the 1930s, this was followed by the Baby Boom (1947-64), which was characterized by high birthrates.

Birthrates then declined through the early 1970s. They were relatively stable for a time. But since 2007, there has been a clear downward trend. Currently, we have lower birthrates than during the Great Depression. In fact, birthrates are lower than they have ever been.

1. Another way to understand this is to simply look at the number of births.
2. As reported by the Center for Disease Control, the number of births has been dropping for several years, with a 4% decline between 2019 and 2020.
3. A 4% decline is significantly higher than the year-to-year declines recorded for prior years—between 2015 and 2019 yearly declines were about 1-2% between 2015 to 2019.

Even more important, if we look at monthly data, we can compare the number of births in December 2020 to December 2019. This is an important comparison because December 2020 is when the babies conceived during the pandemic were born. That comparison shows an 8% decline.

1. What’s behind the declining birthrate? Is it changing social attitudes, the expense of having children, or both? Changing attitudes certainly play a role in this trend.
2. For one, the stigma surrounding not having children has decreased.
3. Gender roles are changing too, with women pursuing higher education and careers.

These things take quite a bit of time: to finish school, particularly bachelor’s degrees or more, and then to launch a career. This can lead to a delay in childbearing. Demographers know that a delay in childbearing can lead to fewer children than one had intended to have.

• This is an empirical fact.
• Or sometimes no children.
• I would also add that the economy is a part of this.
• With the decline in manufacturing and offshoring of jobs beginning in the 1970s, it’s harder for people without college degrees to earn a living wage.
• Even for those with college degrees, things have become tough.

There are many young adults trying to make a decent living but having to do so in the “gig” economy. And those jobs don’t pay much. Or we have college-educated folks working two jobs. More broadly, income and wealth inequality has been widening over the last several decades in the U.S.

• One must also consider student debt; this has become a matter of national concern.
• In a project I worked on for about 15 years, young adults were telling us they would not feel “ready” to marry if they have debt.
• And the debt situation has gotten worse since that time and is at an all-time high.
• The same calculus may be a factor in thinking about how many children to have.

Economics have always played a role in families. This includes getting married, staying married and other aspects of family. The main point is that we are not at all in the same economy that helped spur the Baby Boom back in the 1950s. Now demographers and other scientists are studying the economic impact of the pandemic.

• A great deal of research is being done right now; it is too soon to tell, but data are suggesting that the pandemic has led to fewer births and I believe the economy is a part of that.
• Faced with job loss or high levels of uncertainty about the future, birthrates are likely to be affected.
• Do you think we would see a boost in the birthrate if the United States implemented universal daycare and preschool? I come to this question knowing that other countries that offer subsidies for children or generous paid leave surrounding childbearing for fathers and mothers have not managed to boost fertility.

Their fertility rates, like ours, are below “replacement,” or the average number of children born per woman required for our population to exactly replace itself. But who knows? It’s possible. The Baby Boom was not predicted by demographers. But there are other good reasons for universal day care and preschool.

1. It makes it easier for parents to have full-time jobs; income is good for the entire family.
2. These initiatives could also help narrow the continuing gender gap in pay.
3. Narrowing the gap is a continuing challenge.
4. Is the precipitous decline in the birthrate over the last year a surprise? Why, or why not? Absolutely not.

The economy and public health crisis have been major stressors—the future seems uncertain. This scenario is not conducive to deciding to have a first or additional child. In what ways does a declining birthrate impact the economic future of a country? The big takeaway from the trends we are seeing is that low birthrates “age” the population as a whole.

We have an aging population. People might say, “So?” It can have a large effect in that there will be fewer working-age adults and more elderly. For one, economists know that this is not good for the economy. Also, consider Social Security, a program designed to financially help support our older population.

Fewer working-age adults, who are paying for Social Security, does not bode well for the Social Security program and the financial security of our older population. : What’s behind the falling U.S. birthrate?
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What was parenting like in the 1930s?

1 | Open-air baby cages – In the 1930s, if you wanted to know if a mother really cared about her baby, all you had to do was look at where her baby slept. Any mother worth her salt, the experts said, would lock her baby in a metal cage that was hanging out the window.

1. Baby cages were created as a way to get city kids outdoors.
2. Parenting experts, at the time, said that babies needed to be “aired out” with the odd trip outside.
3. For moms in apartments, though, the easy way to get your babies out was to hang them precariously out of the windowsill.
4. These things sold decently well – even Eleanor Roosevelt owned one and let her own daughter rest on a metal mesh hanging out the window.

Sales started to drop, though, as a new parenting fad started to catch on: caring whether your child lives or dies.
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Did kids run away during the Great Depression?

The second major wave of increased runaway activity occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Children, once again with the consent of their parents, left their homes in search of economic opportunity.
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Who stopped the Great Depression?

Overview | Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress, 1938 The widespread prosperity of the 1920s ended abruptly with the stock market crash in October 1929 and the great economic depression that followed.

• The depression threatened people’s jobs, savings, and even their homes and farms.
• At the depths of the depression, over one-quarter of the American workforce was out of work.
• For many Americans, these were hard times.
• The New Deal, as the first two terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency were called, became a time of hope and optimism.

Although the economic depression continued throughout the New Deal era, the darkest hours of despair seemed to have passed. In part, this was the result of FDR himself. In his first inaugural address, FDR asserted his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” As FDR provided leadership, most Americans placed great confidence in him.

• The economic troubles of the 1930s were worldwide in scope and effect.
• Economic instability led to political instability in many parts of the world.
• Political chaos, in turn, gave rise to dictatorial regimes such as Adolf Hitler’s in Germany and the military’s in Japan.
• Totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union and Italy predated the depression.) These regimes pushed the world ever-closer to war in the 1930s.

When world war finally broke out in both Europe and Asia, the United States tried to avoid being drawn into the conflict. But so powerful and influential a nation as the United States could scarcely avoid involvement for long. When Japan attacked the U.S.

• Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, the United States found itself in the war it had sought to avoid for more than two years.
• Mobilizing the economy for world war finally cured the depression.
• Millions of men and women joined the armed forces, and even larger numbers went to work in well-paying defense jobs.

World War Two affected the world and the United States profoundly; it continues to influence us even today. : Overview | Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress
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What probably ended the Great Depression?

World War II and recovery – A female factory worker in 1942, Fort Worth, Texas, Women entered the workforce as men were drafted into the armed forces. The common view among economic historians is that the Great Depression ended with the advent of World War II, Many economists believe that government spending on the war caused or at least accelerated recovery from the Great Depression, though some consider that it did not play a very large role in the recovery, though it did help in reducing unemployment.

The rearmament policies leading up to World War II helped stimulate the economies of Europe in 1937–1939. By 1937, unemployment in Britain had fallen to 1.5 million. The mobilization of manpower following the outbreak of war in 1939 ended unemployment. When the United States entered the war in 1941, it finally eliminated the last effects from the Great Depression and brought the U.S.

unemployment rate down below 10%. In the U.S., massive war spending doubled economic growth rates, either masking the effects of the Depression or essentially ending the Depression. Businessmen ignored the mounting national debt and heavy new taxes, redoubling their efforts for greater output to take advantage of generous government contracts.
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How were children treated in the 1930s?

Work – 1930s: With record unemployment, children competed for jobs with their elders to help contribute to their family’s income, often forgoing school. Children of the 1930s were at least protected under child labor reform measures of the 1920s, which limited their workday to eight hours and provided guidelines for employment of minors.

1. Many children were self-employed, collecting junk to sell or doing odd jobs for neighbors.
2. Today: In Minnesota, no one younger than 14 may be employed.
3. However, there are certain exceptions, including newspaper carrier, actor, and model.
4. Minors younger than 16 cannot use power-driven lawn equipment, such as lawn mowers, weed whips, or hedge trimmers.

Chores commonly done around the home are exempt from child labor laws.
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What did kids do in the 1920s?

Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development So I was looking through an old Census report and I found a chapter entitled “Children in Gainful Occupations.” Turns out, about 1 million children age 10 to 15 were working in America in 1920 (out of a total population of 12 million kids in that age range).
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When did all children go to school in England?

In 1880 a further Education Act finally made school attendance compulsory between the ages of five and ten, though by the early 1890s attendance within this age group was falling short at 82 per cent.
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What was it like in the Great Depression for kids?

From 1929 to 1940 during The Great Depression many people were without a job and had little or no money. Many children didn’t have enough food to eat, a car to ride in, a big enough house, or enough clothes. Many had to quit school to work in a factory or on a farm.
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How did people survive the Great Depression?

The economic collapse of the 1930s was staggering in its dimensions. Unemployment jumped from less than 3 million in 1929 to 4 million in 1930, 8 million in 1931, and 12 1/2 million in 1932. In that year, a quarter of the nation’s families did not have a single employed wage earner. Even those fortunate enough to have jobs suffered drastic pay cuts and reductions in hours. Only one company in ten failed to cut pay, and in 1932, three-quarters of all workers were on part-time schedules, averaging just 60 percent of the normal work week. The economic collapse was terrifying in its scope and impact. By 1933 average family income had tumbled 40 percent, from $2,300 in 1929 to just $1,500 four years later.

In the Pennsylvania coal fields, three or four families crowded together in one-room shacks and lived on wild weeds. In Arkansas, families were found inhabiting caves. In Oakland, California, whole families lived in sewer pipes. Vagrancy shot up as many families were evicted from their homes for nonpayment of rent.

The Southern Pacific Railroad boasted that it threw 683,000 vagrants off its trains in 1931. Free public flophouses and missions in Los Angeles provided beds for 200,000 of the uprooted. To save money, families neglected medical and dental care. Many families sought to cope by planting gardens, canning food, buying used bread, and using cardboard and cotton for shoe soles.

Despite a steep decline in food prices, many families did without milk or meat. In New York City, milk consumption declined a million gallons a day. President Herbert Hoover declared, “Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes are better fed than they have ever been.” But in New York City in 1931, there were 20 known cases of starvation; in 1934, there were 110 deaths caused by hunger.

• There were so many accounts of people starving in New York that the West African nation of Cameroon sent $3.77 in relief.
• The Depression had a powerful impact on family life.
• It forced couples to delay marriage and drove the birthrate below the replacement level for the first time in American history.

The divorce rate fell, for the simple reason that many couples could not afford to maintain separate households or pay legal fees. But rates of desertion soared. By 1940, 1.5 million married women were living apart from their husbands. More than 200,000 vagrant children wandered the country as a result of the breakup of their families.

What was it like to grow up during the Great Depression of the 1930s? How did the Depression alter family roles? Did Depression hardship strengthen or weaken family bonds?

Copyright Digital History 2021

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What triggered the Great Depression?

What Caused the Great Depression? David Wheelock : Now, what caused this mess? Well, the stock market crash is everyone’s kind of popular cause of the Great Depression. We had a stock market crash in the fall of 1929, immediately we had the Great Depression, therefore if — I used to know the Latin for that, it’s whatever it was — post hoc ergo propter hoc — one followed from the other.

• Therefore, the first one caused the second one.
• For this, there’s some truth to it actually.
• The stock market lost 80%, or 85%, of its value from the peak in September 1929 to the trough in July 1932.
• Now, what could (the) that wipeout of the stock market have done? Well, it destroyed a lot of wealth.
• There’s the so-called wealth effect.

So if you were an investor in the stock market, and in the 1920s a lot of kind of middle-class people got into the stock market for the very first time, there was a lot more buying of stocks on credit. It was the great credit boom. And so a lot of ordinary folk like us got into the stock market, but it was still pretty much a rich man’s game.

1. Rich men lost a lot of money.
2. Some of them jumped out of windows on Wall Street, and they certainly, with their decline of wealth, could afford to buy a lot less goods and services than they did before.
3. So there’s a wealth effect that matters.
4. Uncertainty about the economy, even if you are not an investor in the stock market, but you saw the smart rich guys jumping out of windows on Wall Street, you have to be wondering,

What in the world is happening here? Is this really healthy, an indication of a healthy economy? Well, probably not. So what are you going to do? What’s the logical thing to do if you’ve got a little money in the bank? Keep it there, save. You’re not going to go out and buy a new car or a new refrigerator, go on a vacation.

1. You’re going to hunker down and be as conservative as you can until the clouds have cleared away and you have a better sense of the future of the economy.
2. Christina Romer — some of you may know that name, she’s an economic historian who teaches at University of California, Berkeley — and she was, for a time, President Obama’s chairperson of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Christina wrote a paper that was published a few years ago looking at this uncertainty effect of the stock market crash. Her research found that after the stock market crash, there was a lot less spending on consumer durable goods, like cars and refrigerators, all those newfangled inventions that had come along in the 20s.

• But the level of spending on food and fuel and basic necessities kept right on steady.
• So people kept buying their daily necessities, but they really pulled back on the big-ticket spending.
• And so it did have a measurable effect.
• That is, the stock market crash did have a measurable effect on spending.

And then there’s the role of banks. Banks were heavily involved in lending to investors in the stock market; many banks subsequently failed. So there’s this connection as part of the financial fabric was involved here. So the consensus among economists — excuse me, economic historians — is the stock market crash had some effect.

• However, as big as it was, still not big enough to have caused the Great Depression.
• Without the stock market crash alone we would have had a pretty severe recession, but we would not have had the Great Depression.
• So there must be more to the story than that.
• Some people point to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, enacted by Congress in 1930, signed by President Hoover against a petition signed by hundreds of economists at the time saying “don’t do this, it’s a mistake.” Well, big business and agriculture, they wanted protection from foreign competition.

They didn’t like the fact that there were cheap imported goods of rice and wheat and corn and and manufactured goods coming in from abroad. And so they petitioned Congress to raise tariffs to block those imports or to make them more expensive to discourage consumers from buying the goods and services.

• Well, what happens when one country raises its tariff? They all did — it was retaliatory.
• Canada raised their tariffs, United Kingdom raises its tariffs, France raises its tariff.
• So everybody’s putting up these walls against trade to try to protect their domestic industries from foreign competition and everybody ends up losing.

So there’s a tremendous collapse in world trade. I stole this picture, I mean I borrowed this picture from a book called The World in Depression by Charles Kindleberger, who is an economist and economic historian at MIT. And he investigated the collapse of world trade during the Great Depression and I thought this was a cool chart because it just shows this downward spiral of world trade that was going on during the Depression, from about three billion dollars’ worth of trade in 1929, it collapsed by two-thirds to less than a billion dollars by 1933.

• So the global economy that is trading shrank by two-thirds, whereas the U.S.
• Economy shrank by one-third, so that was a much bigger collapse than the total amount by which the U.S.
• Economy collapsed.
• However, the U.S.
• Was much of a what we call a “closed economy” in the 1930s.
• International trade accounted for a relatively small part of domestic U.S.

production, so despite the fact that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was was not helpful at best and other countries retaliated, the decline in world trade, the decline of U.S. exports was not big enough to have caused the Great Depression, although it was another contributor.

• There’s a professor at UCLA, Lee Ohanian, recently has a paper blaming Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression.
• Now Hoover has often long been blamed for the Great Depression.
• He was blamed as this sourpuss who didn’t care about people.
• Heck, it’s all right, people get laid off.
• I’m going to put the water cannons on him or worse, if they’re in trouble.” Now, Hoover has been a much-maligned individual over the years.

He was a great humanitarian during World War I and he basically fed the country of Belgium during the war. He was also — he was an engineer by training, he was really an interventionist in the economy and was one for using the government to help solve problems.

One thing he did when he saw the Great Depression come on is he asked the big corporations not to cut wages, which was their traditional inclination when the demand for their products fell, they would cut wages. Prices fell, they’d cut wages. Man in audience : But they keep people employed. Wheelock : That’s the difference.

So according to Ohanian, Hoover brought all these guys in that said don’t cut wages because if you cut wages, then people won’t have income to spend. Well that — there is some logic to that, but in a macroeconomic sense that doesn’t hold up. So what happens, as you pointed out, instead of cutting wages, they laid people off instead.

• So it’s great if you’re one of the 75% who kept a job but it was not so great for the 25% who went from the wage to nothing.
• That’s Ohanian’s argument.
• Now it’s not a widely accepted view.
• I’m rather skeptical that Hoover had as much power as Ohanian ascribes to him to actually get big business to come in and do what he wanted them to do.

But it is true, the wages did not fall very rapidly at the beginning of the Depression. As I pointed out, in talking to Ohanian, you wouldn’t have had this problem if we didn’t have deflation. If prices weren’t falling, because the prices of the cars that Ford was trying to sell or General Motors was trying to sell, if they weren’t falling, then Ford, General Motors wouldn’t have had any reason to cut wages or lay people off.

So the deflation was kind of the problem, it wasn’t Hoover so much. And there, where I get to the meat of my story, which is to blame the Fed, and, I’ve been monologuing it here for 40 minutes so I’m happy to take a break and stop and answer any questions as we go. Particularly if anybody’s completely lost or asleep at this point.

I don’t see more than half the room is not asleep despite having that dessert but. Woman in audience : I think I saw your original presentation here. Wheelock : So you’re really bored then, you’ve seen the whole thing, You want it to quit right now, then.

Woman in audience : I really need a lot of economics support, but um. as I remember it and not jumping ahead too far, and what I share with my students generally is the Fed’s inaction to do anything with monetary policy is what exacerbated it. Is that.? Wheelock : Yep, you got the story. You really can leave now,

Woman in audience : But I guess, if you — I need that explained to me again, so I shouldn’t leave. Wheelock : OK. : What Caused the Great Depression?
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Who gave birth to the most kids in history?

Mothers and couples – This section lists mothers who gave birth to at least 20 children. Numbers in bold and italics are likely to be legendary or inexact, some of them having been recorded before the 19th century. Due to the fact that women bear the children and therefore cannot reproduce as often as men, their records are often shared with or exceeded by their partners.

Total children birthed	Mother or couple (if known)	Approximate year of last birth	Notes
69	Valentina and	1765	Valentina Vassilyev and her husband Feodor Vassilyev are alleged to hold the record for the most children a couple has produced. She gave birth to a total of 69 children – sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets – between 1725 and 1765, a total of 27,67 of the 69 children were said to have survived infancy. Allegedly Vassilyev also had six sets of twins and two sets of triplets with a second wife, for another 18 children in eight births; he fathered a total of 87 children. The claim is disputed as records at this time were not well kept.
57	Mr and Ms Kirillov	1755	The first wife of peasant Yakov Kirillov from the village of Vvedensky, Russia, gave birth to 57 children in a total of 21, She had four sets of quadruplets, seven sets of triplets and ten sets of twins. All of the children were alive in 1755, when Kirillov, aged 60, was presented at court. : 6  As with the Vassilyev case, the truth of these claims has not been established, and is highly improbable.
53	Barbara and Adam Stratzmann	1498	It is claimed that Barbara Stratzmann (c.1448 – 1503) of, Germany, gave birth to 53 children (38 sons and 15 daughters) in a total of 29 by 1498. She had one set of septuplets, one set of sextuplets, four sets of triplets and five sets of twins. Nineteen of the children were stillborn, while the eldest surviving was eight years old in 1498. As with the Vassilyev, Gravata and Kirillov cases above, the survival of any one of the offspring of the alleged multiple births is questionable, as is the likelihood of so many multiple births in an era before fertility treatments.
44		2016	from gave birth to 44 children (43 survived infancy) by the age of 36. This included 3 sets of quadruplets, 4 sets of triplets and 6 sets of twins, due to a rare genetic condition causing hyperovulation. In 2019, at the age of 40, she underwent a medical procedure to prevent any further pregnancies. As of April 4, 2023 she was a total of 38 surviving children having lost 6. They comprise 16 girls and 22 boys.
42	Elizabeth and John Mott	1720	Elizabeth Mott of,, married in 1676 and produced 42 live-born children. She died in 1720. : 13
41	Alice Hookes	1553	According to the inscription on a gravestone in Conwy Church cemetery,,, Nicholas Hookes (died 1637) was the 41st child of his mother Alice Hookes, but there were no further details. : 13
39		1681	was the last child of 39 by his mother Elizabeth (1615–1681) and William Greenhill. The family consisted of 7 sons and 32 daughters. Not only is this a large number of live newborns, but is unusual in that all but one pair of twins were single births.
35	Ms and Mr Harrison	1736	Ms Harrison, the wife of an undertaker residing in Vere Street,, gave birth to her 35th child by one husband in 1736.
33	Mary and John Jonas	1892	Mary Jonas (1814–1899) gave birth to 33 children, including 15 sets of boy–girl twins. All were christened, but few reached adulthood. Ten children were still alive when their father John died in 1892.
32	Moddie and Purcell Oliver	1959	Ms Moddie Mae Oliver, aged 50, wife of a Lumberton,, sharecropper, was expecting her 33rd child in 1959. At that time, 22 of her children were alive.
32	Maria Addolorata Casalini	1970	Ms Casalini (born 1929) of, Italy, married at 17 and gave birth to her 32nd child on 11 November 1970. She had two sets of quadruplets, one of triplets, one of twins and nineteen single births. Only 15 children survived.
32	Madalena and Raimundo Carnauba	1961	Madalena Carnauba of, married at 13 and gave birth to 32 children: 24 sons and 8 daughters.
32	Maria Benita Olivera	1989	Ms Olivera (born 1939) of, gave birth to her 32nd child on 31 January 1989. All children were believed to be alive at that time. She was married twice, and had a set of triplets (born when she was 13) and two sets of twins.
30	Rebecca Town	1851	Ms Town (1807–1851) of,, had 30 children, but only one reached age 3.
28	Griffith and Elizabeth Johnson	1790	Elizabeth G Johnson was born in 1732 in Montgomery, Maryland. She married Griffith Johnson on 16 February 1766, in Annapolis, Maryland. They had 28 children in 31 years. She died on 30 January 1790, in Oldtown, Maryland, at the age of 58, and was buried there.
28	Mabel Murphy	1949	Ms Murphy (born 1898) of, Co. Fermanagh, N. Ireland was reported to have produced 28 children (12 stillborn) in 32 years of marriage by December 1949, but this claim has not been fully substantiated.
27	Irene ( née Cooke) and James Arthur Robinson	1936	Ms Robinson of gave birth to her 27th child in 1936. She had 27 children, including six sets of twins in a 24-year period. Eleven children died as babies.
27	Marie-Elise ( née Chamberland) and Heliodore Cyr	1959	Marie-Elise Chamberland and Heliodore Cyr married in 1928 and had 27 children by 1959, all single births.19 of them survived to adulthood. Mr Cyr, a potato farmer from, appeared on the TV show three times – after the births of his 25th, 26th and 27th children.
26	Marilouise (Landry) and William Croteau	1919 ( c.)	Marielouise and William Croteau had 26 children in St. Patrice-de-Beaurivage, Québec including six sets of twins. Two died as infants, one at 10 months, and one at four years.21 survived to adulthood. The last to survive was Madeleine Croteau Houle who lived to be 102 and died on January 31, 2021.
25	Wéber Andrásné Szirotek Teréz	1899	Ms Wéber (b.30 September 1855) of, gave birth to 25 children between 1872 and 1899. She was awarded with a silver medal on 20 August 1930 on the ‘Magyar anyák nemzeti ünnepe’ (Hungarian Mothers National Day).
25	Lapa Piagenti and Giacomo di Benincasa	1347 ( c.)	Their 23rd child was Saint,
25	Ada Watson	1931	Ms Watson (1886–1974) of gave birth to 25 children, including three sets of twins, during the period 1904–1931. All of the children attained majority.
24	Virginia Elizabeth Newton Williford and Henderson H. Williford	1910	Virginia Elizabeth and Henderson H. Williford had 24 children in The Tallyho Township of Granville County, NC From 1882 – 1910 1 set of twins, 1 set of triplets with 19 pregnancies.
24	Kathleen Scott	1958	Ms Scott (b.4 July 1914) of gave birth to her 24th child on 9 August 1958. Twenty of her children were still alive in 1990.
24	Marcella S. ( née Mills) Big Crow and James M. Big Crow Sr.	1989 ( c.)	Marcella Mills-Big Crow (1924–1989) of, had 24 children, including eight pairs of twins. Five children died in infancy.
23	and Louis Christian, Count of Stolberg-Gedern	1705	The great-great-great-grandmother of of the United Kingdom had 23 children in 19 pregnancies between 1684 and 1705 (including four sets of twins); 11 of them survived to adulthood.
23	and King	1807 ( c.)	They had a total of 23 children, 13 of whom lived to adulthood.
23	Tabatha Marcum and Silas Mainord	1811 ( c.)	Married in 1811, they lived in, and produced 23 children. One of their daughters, Syreana, later became the mother of 17.
23	Grace Bagnato	1938	Grace Bagnato and her husband had 23 children; nine of them were conceived in order to compete for a bequest by a eccentric, in what became known as the,
23	Irene and Charles DeMello	1958	Irene DeMello of, gave birth to her 23rd child in February 1958 at the age of 40 in her 25 years of marriage. There were no multiple births. Seventeen of the children were alive, the eldest being 23.
23	Mary and Sylvester Hemsing	1951 ( c.)	Mary Hemsing (1913–2014) of, Canada, gave birth to 11 boys and 12 girls, one of whom was stillborn.
22	Ursula and	1712	The German Count Franz Adolf Dietrich von Ingelheim (1659–1742) of and his wife Ursula (1668–1730) had 22 children between 1683 and 1712.
22		1778	Emily FitzGerald, Duchess of Leinster and her first husband, had nineteen children born between 1748 and 1773. Later she married her children’s tutor ; they had three children, who were born between years 1775 and 1778.
22	Ms and Mr Hostetter	1941	Roy Hostetter, a 46-year-old Pennsylvania miner, and his wife, aged 42, announced the birth of their 22nd child in May 1941.
22	Charlotte and Marlon Story	1946	Charlotte Story of, gave birth to her 22nd child in July 1946. At the time, 19 of the other 21 children, including four sets of twins, were alive. Marion and Charlotte Story participated in in 1950.
22	Ms Dick Renata	1948	Ms Dick Renata, a, of,, gave birth to her 22nd child in November 1948. Fourteen of her children survived, including the second born, who was 21 at the time she gave birth to the 22nd, and was himself a father.
22	Madeleine and Marce Devaud	1952	Madeleine Devaud, wife of a village dairyman of La Gorre, western, gave birth to her 22nd child, a boy, in March 1952, at the age of 42. The Devaud couple, married for 24 years, had 13 girls and seven boys. Two other children died in infancy.
22	Mabel Constable	1950 ( c.)	Ms Constable (born 1920), of,, gave birth to 22 children, including a set of triplets and two sets of twins.
22	Margaret McNaught	1945 ( c.)	Ms McNaught (born 1923), of,, gave birth to 22 children, 12 boys (2 of them died in infancy) and 10 girls, all single births.
22	Effie ( née Estes) and Charles Dickey	1914 ( c.)	From, Ms Dickey gave birth to 22 children, all single births. All of them lived to adulthood, with 18 of them living at least 70 years of age (the others died at ages 30, 58, 60 and 67).
22	Unidentified Romani woman	1998	A 38-year-old Romani woman of, gave birth to her 22nd child in March 1998. She and her husband had no jobs.17 children lived with them and five were in orphanages.
22	Alice ( née Spencer) &	1660 ( c.)	Jennings was an MP of St. Albans before the, He names 3 of these children in his will, dated 1642, and his wife’s will names 7 of them, dated 1663. Their granddaughter was,
22		2020	Sue (Suzanne) Radford has given birth to 22 children as of April 2020, 11 boys and 11 girls, all single births. Alfie (their 17th) was stillborn. At this time, their eldest son (Christopher) is 30 years old. They have six grandchildren. They have a bakery which is the family business and live in Morecambe, Britain. All of them are healthy and thriving. The tv series 22 kids and counting documents their lives
21+	Mary Susannah Roberts ( née Sautelle) and	1749 ( c.)	18th-century Irish and his wife. Of their children, said to number 21 or 24, only eight survived to adulthood, including the painters and,
21	Johanna O’Sullivan and William O’Daly	1837	They had 21 children in 29 years, 6 sons and 15 daughters, born between 1808 and 1837 in Gurrane,,,, There were no multiple births, and all of the children were born alive – it is likely that there were a number of stillborn children too. Four children died in childhood, and the last child, Bridget Russell, died in 1923. Descendants of Johanna and William include,,, and, captain of the rugby team.
21	Barbara Bremner and Thomas Burns	1978	Barbara and Thomas resided in Rogers Park on the north side of Chicago. Barbara gave birth to 21 single birth live children. She had her first daughter in 1951, and last in 1978. They supported their children on Tom’s salary as an electrician, and Barbara ran a secretarial and phone-answering service, called Barb’s Wire, from her home for many years. All 21 children reached adulthood.
21		1783	Guinness was an Irish brewer. Only ten of their children lived to adulthood.
21	Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear	1812	Their 20th child was English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet (born 1812).
21	Olivia ( née Gutenberger) and Rudolph Schoelzel Sr.	1949	They had 21 children in 24 years, 11 sons and 10 daughters, born between 1925 and 1949 in, Wisconsin, USA. There were no multiple births. One daughter died in infancy, and one son died in 1947, aged 21.
21	Domitille ( née Brun) and Pierre Martin	1861	They had 21 children in 25 years, 11 sons and 10 daughters, born and baptized between 1835 and 1861 in,,, There were no multiple births.
21	Teodora ( née Lopez) and Raymundo Olivas	1853 ( c.)	Born in 1809 in Los Angeles, Raymundo Olivas met his future wife, Teodora Lopez, in Santa Barbara. They were married in 1832, and together they had 21 children – 13 boys and eight girls. In 1841 Raymundo built the, an important part of ‘s cultural heritage.
21	Josephine & Michael Salzo Sr.	1923 ( c.)	The 21 children included the first known surviving set of quadruplets in New Haven, Connecticut; triplets; and two sets of twins.
21	Anna and Henry Crocker	1963 ( c.)	18 of their children lived to adulthood.
21	Ms and Mr Albert Cunningham	1930	The couple from, welcomed their 21st child in September 1930 after 27 years of marriage. Seventeen of their children were alive.
21	Mary Chaloner Hale	1789	The wife of (1728–1806), Mary Hale (1743–1803, born Mary Chaloner in ) bore 21 offspring between the years of 1764 and 1789, including her first child,,
21	Elizabeth Hudson	1955	Ms Hudson, of, the wife of a paint sprayer, gave birth to her 21st child in February 1955, at the age of 45. Sixteen of the children were alive.
21	Mary and Wara Tengu	1968	The couple from, welcomed their 21st child in January 1968; the mother was then 42 years old. They already had five grandchildren.
21	Ofelia Llanes Gaxiola	1960 ( c.)	Ms Ofelia Llanes Gaxiola, of Culiacán, Sinaloa. the wife of a postman, gave birth to her 21 children.
21	Aliza and Meir Ben-Haroush	1969	Aliza Ben-Haroush of gave birth to her 21st child in July 1969 at the age of 46 and became the most prolific mother in,
21	Unidentified Indian woman	1970	Not much is known about this case except that a woman from gave birth to her 21st child in 1970.
21	Leonora and Yanosh Nameni	2013	Leonora Nameni, of Ostritsa,,, gave birth to her 21st child in October 2013, at the age of 44, becoming the most prolific mother in, Leonora and Yanosh are followers of the and do not practice, The Nameni family has 11 sons and 10 daughters, including two sets of twins.
21	Sebastiana Maria da Conceicao	2015	Sebastiana Maria da Conceicao, aged 51, gave birth to her 21st child in the city of,, in May 2015. The boy joined the family of 10 brothers and 10 sisters, of whom 18 were alive.
20	Elizabeth and William Dunn	1798	William Dunn and his wife Elizabeth née Marson of Atwick, Yorkshire, England, were married on 7 February 1774. They had 20 children born between 1774 and 1798, no multiple births, but two children were stillborn. The Atwick Baptism Records state that Ann born 1798 and baptised on 28 October 1798 was ‘their 20th child’. On their son Benjamin’s baptism in 1797 the record states that he was their ’19th child 17 of which were baptised and 2 stillborn in the space of 23 years’.
20	Jane ( née Purdon) and,	1590 ( c.)	The, and later of, and,, had 20 children with his wife Jane between c.1559 and 1590, twelve of whom survived to adulthood.
20	Catherine Marion de Druy and	1612	Famous lawyer had 20 children with his wife Catherine Marion de Druy between 1588 and 1612, ten of whom survived to adulthood.
20	Elizabeth Carleton	1681 ( c.)	Elizabeth Carleton, daughter of, had one child, daughter Elizabeth, with her first husband Thomas Barker, and 19 children with her second husband Giles Vanbrugh, 12 of whom survived infancy, including English architect and dramatist (1664 – 1726) and Commodore Governor of (c.1681 – 1753).
20	Marie Elisabeth of Eggenberg and	1685	had 20 children with his wife Marie Elisabeth of Eggenberg between 1657 and 1685 (all single births), of whom only five survived to adulthood.
20	Anne Margrethe Rossing and	1718 ( c.)	astronomer and his wife Anne Margrethe Rossing had a total of 20 children. One of their sons,, born 1718, continued his father’s astronomical studies.
20	Barbe Arnault and Antoine Monneron	1758	Barbe Arnault and Antoine Monneron had 20 children between 1733 and 1758 (all single births), 12 of whom survived infancy. Their sons became well known,
20	Rosgen ( née Fuld) and Hayum Lowenstein	1860 ( c.)	Rosgen and Hayum Lowenstein of,, had 20 children, 19 of whom survived to adulthood. The youngest child was born in 1860.
20	Marie Verrault and Pierre Edouard Cauchon	1882	Born between 1853 and 1882 at,,, sixteen of the children died in infancy, and one as a young adult. There were no multiple births.
20	Florestine Piché and Gaspard Beaupré	1881	Florestine Piché and Gaspard Beaupré had 20 children; the eldest of them was famous giant, born in 1881 in,
20	Emma Catherine Padgett and Addison Bidwell Millard	1890	Addison Millard (1843–1898) and Emma Padgett (1849–1919) married in 1865 in, and had 20 children, the last of whom was born in 1890. Six died in infancy. The family moved to in 1893, where they ran for more than 50 years.
20	Elise Steinmann and Leonhard Hauser	1928 ( c.)	The couple had 20 children, seven of whom died as infants. Elise Steinmann (1848–1928) and Leonhard Hauser (1842–1915) were both born in Switzerland. they immigrated to the US in 1882, and settled in Greenwood (now Greenfield) near Rockford, Minnesota.13 of their children were born in Switzerland, and seven in the US.
20	Ella and James Lee Townsend	1917	Ella and James Lee Townsend, sharecroppers from, had a total of 20 children. The youngest of them was, leader, and, born in 1917.
20	Gertrude Louisa Rowe Goodley and George Thomas Jolley	1932	Gertrude and George married in 1905 and had 20 children between 1906 and 1932, when Gertrude was aged 46. The family were from the Tolaga Bay area on New Zealand’s North Island. Issue 227 of the Gisborne Photo News carried a report in 1973 about a reunion of 140 of their descendants and noted that they had 215 direct descendants at that time.
20	Mary and John Fullerton	1935 ( c.)	Mary and John Fullerton from, Ireland, had 20 children, the eldest of whom was, born in 1935.
20	Ms and Mr Rexford Oakley	1954	Ms Oakley, aged 54, from, gave birth to her 20th child in December 1954.18 of the children, including the newborn, were alive.
20	Zola Inez ( née Sutterfield) and Harvey Auston Smith	1956	Ms Smith (born 1 September 1910) gave birth to her 20th child in, in May 1956, at the age of 45. She and her husband, married for 29 years, had 14 sons and six daughters, all single births. Three sons died in infancy. By April 1973 they had 35 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
20	Rose Alma and Roland Letendre	1956 ( c.)	The couple had 20 children; the youngest died as a result of birth injury. All the children were born in, Quebec. Rose Alma died at age 100 in 2018.
20	Ms and Mr Edward Bitter	1958	Ms Bitter, aged 40, the wife of a bricklayer, from, gave birth to her 20th child in January 1958. Four of their children, including a set of twins, were dead. The other 16 were 10 boys and six girls; the oldest of them was 24.
20	Dolores and Prosper Grenier	1961	Dolores Grenier, aged 43, of, gave birth to her 20th child in April 1961. During 26 years of marriage she gave birth to 12 sons and eight daughters, including three sets of twins. Two daughters have died.
20	Eldora and James Parnell	1966	Eldora Parnell, aged 42, of, gave birth to her 20th child in November 1966, after 27 years of marriage.
20	The mother of Maria Goncales Moreira	1984	Not much is known about this case except the fact that she had ten sets of twins. Her daughter also had ten sets of twins (see below).
20	Maria Goncales Moreira	1984	Ms Moreira of,, gave birth to her tenth set of twins (identical boys) on 3 July 1984. Her other twins were 16 girls and two boys. She delivered the first at age 13. Her mother also had ten sets of twins.
20	Jessie Campbell	1990	Ms Campbell (born 1946) of,,, gave birth to her 20th child on 22 January 1990.
20	Julianna and Ernő Lukács	1991	Julianna Lukács and her husband, a Hungarian farmer, have six sons and fourteen daughters. They live in,, in a mansion farming on 3,336 acres (1,350 ha). The first child was born in 1966 and the last in 1991.
20	Valentina and Anatoliy Khromykh	1993 ( c.)	Valentina Khromykh from,,, gave birth to 20 children, 11 boys and 9 girls. As of May 2015, 15 of the children were alive (two died in infancy and other three at the ages of 12, 28 and 32), the oldest child was 46 and the youngest was 22. Also by May 2015, Valentina was 64, she had been married to Anatoliy Khromykh for 46 years, and they already had ten grandchildren.
20	Elena and Alexander Shishkin	2003	Elena Shishkina (born 1958) of, Russia, gave birth to her 20th child in April 2003, becoming the most prolific mother in Russia; her eldest son was 24 at that time. The Shishkins have 9 sons and 11 daughters, and had 20 grandchildren by November 2012.
20	Marie and Antonín Kludský	1909 ( c.)	Marie (1832–1909) and Antonín Kludský (1826–1895) from were parents of 20 boys and ancestors of the famous cirque family Kludský.
20	Georgiana Văcaru	2020 ( c.)	Georgiana Văcaru (born 1976) from is the woman with the most children in Romania.
20	Maria ( née Potter) and James Burton	1871 ( c.)	Maria (1812–1871) and James Burton (1811–1888) of, in were parents to 20 children, 9 died in infancy and another 2 died young.
20	“Dorothea”	1550 ( c.)	Dorothea, an Italian woman who lived at the time of, reportedly delivered 20 children in 2 exceptionally large pregnancies. She first carried 9 children, and then 11. It is unknown whether the children survived.

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How were babies born in the 1700s?

Digital History > Topics > Private Life Childbirth in Early America Digital History TOPIC ID 70 When the Mayflower left Plymouth, England, September 16, 1620, on its historic voyage to the New World, three of its 102 passengers were pregnant. Elizabeth Hopkins and Susanna White were each in their seventh month of pregnancy. Mary Norris Allerton was in her second or third month. Their pregnancies must have been excruciatingly difficult. After a few days of clear weather, the Mayflower ran into “fierce storms” that lasted for six of the voyage’s nine-and-a-half weeks. For days on end, passengers were confined to the low spaces between decks, while torrential winds blew away clothing and supplies and the ship tossed and rolled on the heavy seas. While the ship was still at sea, Elizabeth Hopkins gave birth to a baby boy named Oceanus after his birthplace. Two weeks later, while the Mayflower was anchored off Cape Cod, Susanna White also had a baby boy. He was christened Peregrine, a name that means “pilgrim.” Peregrine White would live into his eighties, but Oceanus Hopkins died during the Pilgrim’s first winter in Plymouth. In the spring of 162l, Mary Norris Allerton died in childbirth; her baby was stillborn. Childbirth in colonial America was a difficult and sometimes dangerous experience for women. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between 1 percent and 1.5 percent of all births ended in the mother’s death as a result of exhaustion, dehydration, infection, hemorrhage, or convulsions. Since the typical mother gave birth to between five and eight children, her lifetime chances of dying in childbirth ran as high as 1 in 8. This meant that if a woman had eight female friends, it was likely that one might die in childbirth. Death in childbirth was sufficiently common that many colonial women regarded pregnancy with dread. In their letters, women often referred to childbirth as “the Dreaded apperation,” “the greatest of earthly miserys,” or “that evel hour I loock forward to with dread.” Many, like New England poet Anne Bradstreet, approached childbirth with a fear of impending death. In a poem entitled “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” Bradstreet wrote, How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend, How soon’t may be thy lot to lose thy friend. In addition to her anxieties about pregnancy, an expectant mother was filled with apprehensions about the death of her newborn child. The death of a child in infancy was far more common than it is today. In the healthiest seventeenth century communities, one infant in ten died before the age of five. In less healthy environments, three children in ten died before their fifth birthday. Puritan minister Cotton Mather saw eight of his fifteen children die before reaching the age of two. “We have our children taken from us,” Mather cried out, “the Desire of our Eyes taken away with a stroke.” Given the high risk of birth complications and infant death, it is not surprising to learn that pregnancy was surrounded by superstitions. It was widely believed that if a mother looked upon a “horrible spectre” or was startled by a loud noise her child would be disfigured. If a hare jumped in front of her, her child was in danger of suffering a harelip. There was also fear that if the mother looked at the moon, her child might become a lunatic or sleepwalker. A mother’s ungratified longings, it was thought, could cause an abortion or leave a mark imprinted on her child’s body. At the same time, however, women were expected to continue to perform work until the onset of labor, since hard work supposedly made for an easier labor. Pregnant women regularly spun thread, wove clothing on looms, performed heavy lifting and carrying, milked cows, and slaughtered and salted down meat. Today, most women give birth in hospitals under close medical supervision. If they wish, women can take anesthetics to relieve labor pangs. During the seventeen and eighteenth centuries, the process of childbirth was almost wholly different. In colonial America, the typical woman gave birth to her children at home, while female kin and neighbors clustered at her bedside to offer support and encouragement. When the daughter of Samuel Sewall, a Puritan magistrate, gave birth to her first child on the last day of January, 1701, at least eight other women were present at her bedside, including her mother, her mother-in-law, a midwife, a nurse, and at least four other neighbors. Most women were assisted in childbirth not by an doctor but by a midwife. Most midwives were older women who relied on practical experience in delivering children. One midwife, Martha Ballard, who practiced in Augusta, Maine, delivered 996 women with only four recorded fatalities. Skilled midwives were highly valued. Communities tried to attract experienced midwives by offering a salary or a house rent-free. In addition to assisting in childbirth, midwives helped deliver the offspring of animals, attended the baptisms and burials of infants, and testified in court in cases of bastardy. During labor, midwives administered no painkillers, except for alcohol. Pain in childbirth was considered God’s punishment for Eve’s sin of eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Women were merely advised to “arm themselves with patience” and prayer and to try, during labor, to restrain “those dreadful groans and cries which do so much discourage their friends and relations that are near them.” After delivery, new mothers were often treated to a banquet. At one such event, visitors feasted on “boil’d pork, beef, flowls, very good rost beef, turkey-pye, tarts.” Women from well-to-do families were then expected to spend three to four weeks in bed convalescing. Their attendants kept the fire place burning and wrapped them in a heavy blanket in order to help them sweat out “poisons.” Women from poorer families were generally back at work in one or two days. During the second half of the eighteenth century, customs of childbirth began to change. One early sign of change was the growing insistence among women from well-to-do urban families that their children be delivered by male midwives and doctors. Many upper class families assumed that in a difficult birth trained physicians would make childbirth safer and less painful. In order to justify their presence, physicians tended to take an active role in the birth process. They were much more likely than midwives to intervene in labor with forceps and drugs. Another important change was the introduction in 1847 of two drugs – ether and chloroform – to relieve pain in childbirth. By the 1920s, the use of anesthesia in childbirth was almost universal. The practice of putting women to sleep during labor contributed to a shift from having children at home to having children in hospitals. In 1900, over 90 percent of all births occurred in the mother’s home. But by 1940, over half took place in hospitals and by 1950, the figure had reached 90 percent. The substitution of doctors for midwives and of hospital delivery for home delivery did little in themselves to reduce mortality rates for mothers. It was not until around 1935, when antibiotics and transfusions were introduced, that a sharp reduction in the maternal mortality rate occurred. In 1900, maternal mortality was about 65 times higher than it is today, and not much lower than it had been in the mid-nineteenth century. By World War II, however, death in childbirth had been cut to its present low level. In recent years, a reaction has occurred against the sterile impersonality of modern hospital delivery. Women today are much more likely than their mothers or grandmothers to want a “natural childbirth.” Beginning in the l960s, a growing number of women elected to bear their children without anesthetics, so that they could be fully conscious during childbirth. Many women also chose to have their husbands or a relative or a friend present during labor and delivery and to bear their children in special “birthing rooms” that provide a home-like environment. In these ways, many contemporary women have sought to recapture the broader support network that characterized childrearing in the colonial past, without sacrificing the tremendous advances that have been made in maternal and infant health. Copyright Digital History 2021
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How were babies born in the 1920s?

1920s – Hospital birth became more common, including the systematic use of forceps, episiotomy and anesthesia as advocated by Dr. Joseph DeLee.1942 – Dr. Grantly Dick-Read proclaimed the benefits of ‘natural childbirth, without anesthesia or tools,’ in his bestseller ‘Childbirth Without Fear.’
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What is the hardest year of parenting?

The Impossible Question: Which Parenting Year Is Hardest? – As anyone who has ever raised a child knows, parenting is no easy task. This is crystal clear even to people without kids. All it takes is a sibling, a friend or a neighbor with kids to understand that the job of parenting is multi-faceted and virtually endless.

For some parents, infancy is the hardest. For others, it’s toddlerhood. Some parents feel that the preschool years present special challenges. While many parents agree that the period between ages six and ten can offer some breathing room since kids are still very sweet and (for the most part) haven’t yet developed the attitude that almost inevitably starts to emerge around middle school, it’s not too hard to find parents who consider these years just as challenging as those immediately before and after.

Finally, there’s adolescence. It almost goes without saying that somewhere in the physical laws of the universe it’s written that the years between ages thirteen and eighteen are filled with their own special brand of turmoil and tumult. From social pressures, to pushing behavioral boundaries, to experimentation with drugs and alcohol, to boy-girl issues, to acne – a pimple in the wrong place on the wrong day can turn into the most dramatic event of an adolescent’s entire life – the teenage years are nothing if not interesting.
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How many children died during the Great Depression?

MODERN CHILDHOOD AND THE ONSET OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION An estimated U.S. infant mortality rate of 130 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1900 fell to 85.8 deaths in 1920 and to 64.6 in 1930.
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When did mom become common?

“Mom” and “mommy” began appearing in the mid 19th century, part of a slew of variations, including mam, mum, and marm, that pop up in dialect and casual written language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Marm” would’ve usually been pronounced without the “r,” said Ben Zimmer, linguist and producer of Visual Thesaurus—and a former writer of this column—meaning that “Little Women”‘s Marmee was probably an early namesake of today’s mommies.) As the language in general became more standardized in the late 19th and early 20th century, “mom” became the prevalent spelling.

Get Today in Opinion Globe Opinion’s must-reads, delivered to you every Sunday-Friday. “Mom” was also an appealing alternative to “mama” and “mother,” the two other big contenders at the time. “Mama” carried class signifiers, depending on whether you said it with an off-the-boat, Scandinavian accent or accentuated the second syllable (Frenchified and fancy).

“Mother,” as a title, was a relic of Victorian “Mother Love,” the notion that the bond between mother and child was a sacred, all-encompassing duty, according to Rebecca Jo Plant, a historian at UC San Diego and author of “Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America.” “Mom,” on the other hand, is a teenager’s word, colloquial and even a bit gum-snapping: A 1911 OED listing describes “City-wearied fathers of youngsters who called their parents ‘pop’ and ‘mom.'” “When people switched to use mom and pop, it’s.more playful,” Plant said.

“‘Mom’ could be your friend.” Marmee, played by Mary Astor, reads to her daughters in MGM’s 1949 production of “Little Women.” bettman/corbis As the 20th century came into its own, “Mom” became a key character in two central arenas of mid-century American fantasy, patriotism and commercialism.

1. The frequently repeated idea that World War II soldiers were fighting for “Mom and apple pie” and the rise of the phrase “mom-and-pop store” in the 1940s both helped fuel the word’s dominance.
2. Around the same time, “mom” and “mommy” began to be invoked in advertisements for everything from soap to cerea l to war bonds to Kotex maxi-pads to cigarettes (next to an image of a sad-looking baby: “Before you scold me, Mom.maybe you’d better light up a Marlboro!”).

By the later ’60s, when the editors of DARE were asking people around the country what they called their mothers, “mom” was by far the most popular choice, with “mother” and “mamma” following behind. The 1950s mom with her apron and sparkling kitchen began to fade from advertising by the mid-1970s, as feminism gathered force and women flooded back into the workplace.

Mom,” however, thrived. And it expanded its syntactic territory, going from an informal term of address for an individual mother to become a common way to refer to all mothers, with certain expectations attached. This public, collective use of “mom” had already started by the 1950s—”mom cult” is an early harbinger in the OED—but it really took off in the 1980s and 1990s.

Meredith Michaels and Susan J. Douglas’s 2004 book, “The Mommy Myth,” points to early “celebrity mom” profiles as helping drive the shift toward mom-ization: the explosion of tabloid stories, beginning after the Diana-Charles wedding boom and showing no sign of abating, that described stars like Whitney Houston or Niki Taylor as “Superstar Moms,” “Hollywood Moms,” or “The Sexy New Moms,” and interviewed them about why motherhood had made their lives complete.

1. Mom” isn’t quite “mother”—it’s cozier, more intimate.
2. So what does it mean to be called “mom” if it’s not by your own child? Michaels, a professor of philosophy at Smith College, sees in the label “a kind of infantilizing of the mother,” defining her almost in baby talk.
3. Mom,” a more private term than “mother,” also places a mother’s nurturing role above any other female-parent duties (running a household or providing for the family, for instance).

As Douglas, a communication studies professor at University of Michigan, points out, you’re a “stay-at-home mom,” but a “working mother” (or worse, a “welfare mother”)—and there’s some judgment implied on both sides. Today, the word “mom” has become central to the loaded, intense way motherhood is discussed in the media—for example, in the aggressive 2012 Time magazine cover story “Are You Mom Enough?”, featuring a photo of a 3-year-old breastfeeding.

1. A nostalgic and affectionate use of “mom” still persists in advertising, especially food advertising, from the “Shake and Bake Mom” TV ad of the 1990s to the Lunchables S’mores “Fun time Mom” of the early 2000s to the Campbell soup football moms over the past few years.
2. Most recently, there were the Proctor & Gamble “Thank You, Mom” ads during the Olympics, showing mothers cheering their Olympian children to greatness.

That series aimed to bring fond tears to the eyes, but some “mom” marketing rides a more uncomfortable line—like a greeting-card commercial released for this Mother’s Day called “#worldstoughestjob,” in which a human resources representative interviews candidates for a job with zero pay and constant miserable work, then announces it’s already filled: by “moms.” Mom ads don’t just sell to moms; they also sell a concept of “mom,” in this case the ultimate, quasi-Victorian self-sacrificer.

Send her a card already, you ingrate! If “mom” is ubiquitous in advertising, it’s in part due to the market strength of mothers, who control trillions of dollars a year in spending. Child-raising women are equally important to politicians, who have often treated “moms” as an essential voting bloc (as compared with “men”), starting with Bill Clinton’s SUV-driving “soccer” moms back in 1996.

Mitt Romney used the word 14 times in his 2012 Republican National Convention speech, and rallied support during his campaign from a group called Moms for Mitt, Female political figures, meanwhile, use the word to play up their warm, family-oriented side, while male politicians may find that unnecessary.

Hillary Clinton’s Twitter bio begins, “Wife, mom”; Jeb Bush, another likely 2016 contender, doesn’t reference his parental status in his bio, and neither does Bill Clinton. Over the last few years, the status of “mom” may be shifting once again. Douglas thinks that, since the 2004 publication of “The Mommy Myth,” there has been “a certain amount of rebellion” against the strict definitions of motherhood that the authors described.

There’s a wider variety of “mom” types in advertising than ever before (“millennial mom,” “career mom,” “stay-at-home mom in skinny jeans,” etc.), and you’re more likely to find dads ably sharing parenting duties onscreen, as with the “#1 dad” in the Toyota Sienna “Swagger Wagon” commercial from 2010.

In advance of this year’s mid-term elections, analysts have been buzzing about non-moms instead: the befuddling demographic of “unmarried women” (who have now earned their own pop-culture acronym: PANK, or “professional auntie, no kids”). Less emphasis on “mom,” the cultural catchall, might be welcome news for many moms, the people.

For such a tiny word, it’s borne a lot of weight over the years. This Mother’s Day, it might be worth thinking about why Mom is so very important, and yet “mom,” the myth and legend, could stand to be a little less so. Britt Peterson is a writer in Washington, D.C.
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What were boxcar children in the Great Depression?

Children often went without nutritious food and had rickets. Children went to school less often or not at all and tried to help their families by working; others who ran away and traveled on trains became known as ‘Box Car Children.
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How was what happened to men during the Great Depression different from what happened to children?

That men became depressed over the changes in their status, and their inability to provide fro their families. Most men traveled the country looking for work. Women were forced to take a more active role in the survival of their families, by working outside the home. Children stopped going to school, and went to work.
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How did the Great Depression affect people?

“Hooverville,” Central Ohio, 1938 Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives The Great Depression began in 1929 when, in a period of ten weeks, stocks on the New York Stock Exchange lost 50 percent of their value.

1. As stocks continued to fall during the early 1930s, businesses failed, and unemployment rose dramatically.
2. By 1932, one of every four workers was unemployed.
3. Banks failed and life savings were lost, leaving many Americans destitute.
4. With no job and no savings, thousands of Americans lost their homes.
5. The poor congregated in cardboard shacks in so-called Hoovervilles on the edges of cities across the nation; hundreds of thousands of the unemployed roamed the country on foot and in boxcars in futile search of jobs.

Although few starved, hunger and malnutrition affected many. In a country with abundant resources, the largest force of skilled labor, and the most productive industry in the world, many found it hard to understand why the depression had occurred and why it could not be resolved.

Moreover, it was difficult for many to understand why people should go hungry in a country possessing huge food surpluses. Blaming Wall Street speculators, bankers, and the Hoover administration, the rumblings of discontent grew mightily in the early 1930s. By 1932, hunger marches and small riots were common throughout the nation.

In June of 1932, nearly 20,000 World War I veterans from across the country marched on the United States Capitol to request early payment of cash bonuses for their military service that weren’t due to be paid until 1945. The marchers, who the organizers called the “Bonus Expeditionary Force” but who became widely known as the Bonus Army, spent several days in Washington, D.C., pressing their case, but a Congressional bill to pay the bonus was defeated.

On July 28, U.S. troops and tanks commanded by General Douglas MacArthur dispersed the marchers and destroyed their makeshift camps in the city. However, not all citizens were caught up in the social eruptions. Many were too downtrodden or busy surviving day to day to get involved in public displays of discontent.

Instead, they placed their hope and trust in the federal government, especially after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932. To find more documents in Loc.gov related to this topic, use key words such as Great Depression, begging, unemployment, poverty, stock market crash, Bonus Army, and Hoovervilles,
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What is the book children of the Great Depression about?

Children of the Great Depression As he did for frontier children in his enormously popular Children of the Wild West, Russell Freedman illuminates the lives of the American children affected by the economic and social changes of the Great Depression. Middle-class urban youth, migrant farm laborers, boxcar kids, children whose families found themselves struggling for survival,

1. All Depression-era young people faced challenges like unemployed and demoralized parents, inadequate food and shelter, schools they couldn’t attend because they had to go to work, schools that simply closed their doors.
2. Even so, life had its bright spots—like favorite games and radio shows—and many young people remained upbeat and optimistic about the future.

Drawing on memoirs, diaries, letters, and other firsthand accounts, and richly illustrated with classic archival photographs, this book by one of the most celebrated authors of nonfiction for children places the Great Depression in context and shows young readers its human face.

• Endnotes, selected bibliography, index.
• Russell A.
• Freedman was an American biographer and the author of nearly 50 books for young people.
• He may be known best for winning the 1988 Newbery Medal with his work Lincoln: A Photobiography.
• He grew up in San Francisco and attended the University of California, Berkeley, and then worked as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press and as a publicity writer.

His nonfiction books ranged in subject from the lives and behaviors of animals to people in history. Freeedman’s work has earned him several awards, including a Newbery Honor each for Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery in 1994 and The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane in 1992, and a Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal.

• Freedman traveled extensively throughout the world to gather information and inspiration for his books.
• His book, Confucius: The Golden Rule was inspired by his extensive travels through Mainland China, where he visited Confucius’ hometown in modern day QuFu, in the Shantung Province.
• Displaying 1 – 30 of 150 reviews Children of the Great Depression by Russell Freedman is such a real account of what happened during the Great Depression.

We are hearing stories directly from children who were impacted during this terrible time. Many families didn’t have the necessities needed to live. Children couldn’t go to school, they had no shoes, there wasn’t enough food to feed a family, and people were living in Hoovervilles or shacks made out of anything they could find.

• This book provides quotes from children who lived during the Great Depression.
• We hear of the pain they felt because they couldn’t help their family and the different struggles they had to experience.
• This was a time where “in the nation as a whole, 27% of homes lacked refrigeration equipment, 31% had no running water, 32% had an outdoor toilet, and 39% did not have a bathtub or shower.” Children of the Great Depression really made you feel like you were a part of this terrible time.

The stories that they incorporated were so real and incredible.The images that Freedman included within this book were amazing. They had real photographs on almost every single page of children who were suffering, the living conditions, and important things or people during that time.

• I thought the use of the photography made this book so much more inspiring.
• We were able to put ourselves in the children and families shoes.
• They included short captions under each picture so that you knew exactly what was going on.
• The colors of the images really emphasized the feelings and mood that this book represents.

The pictures are all in black and white and don’t evoke a positive feeling. If the pictures would have been in color, the message would have been lost. I think that the stories and the images used in this book are wonderful. Children of the Great Depression would be a wonderful non-fiction text to use in a 5th grade classroom.

The students will be able to empathize with the children they are reading and looking at. There is a lot of really wonderful information in here, so this book would have to be used over an extended period of time. Focusing on one chapter at a time and then really analyzing it would be a necessity. Children are still fragile and this is a tough topic.

This book really is a beautiful account of something tragic that happened many years ago. I think it could instill some humility in the students as well. Overall, the picture’s used, stories included, and structure as a whole was easy to follow and really informative.

Children of the Great Depression is a nonfiction, painting the image of what American had to face during the Great Depression, an era where the country’s economy hits rock bottom in the 1930s especially the children. It tells accounts of various people of how they survived during the difficulties. From not enough food to working parents being laid out to having to skip school for various reasons to have to work to help the family.

The children of that generation face it all and those who survived become successful in a way or another because the hard times taught them to be tough. There are photos accompanying the text and it gives readers a glimpse of the past that otherwise readers’ won’t ever see.

Perfect for people who want to know more about American history in general. Featuring the fine pictures from photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration of FDR’s New Deal, this narrative of the Great Depression is a great resource for any age. It includes Chapter Notes, a Selective Bibliography, and an Index.

Winner of the 2005 Golden Kite Award for Nonfiction. In 1935, a newly created agency of the Roosevelt administration, the FSA, or Farm Security Administration, had the task of documenting through photographs the plight of rural America. In the depths of the Great Depression, these photographers produced more than a quarter of a million images of American rural and uban life.

1. The goal of FSA and these photographers was to convey in human terms the true meaning of economic statistics.
2. The candid, grim, and occasional comedic faces and actions of real Americans during its most trying times are all captured withing the pages and prose of historian Russell Freedman’s pictorial journey “Children of the Great Depression”.

What makes Russell Freedman’s account work for the readers is the sheer scope of his book; the reader sees how the Great Depression had a generational life changing impact on the American people from this era, and Mr. Freedom covers them all: fathers and families, children at school, the Okies journeys to California, box car kids, and Hollywood depictions about and diversions from the Great Depression.

No stone is left untouched, and Mr. Friedman’s ability to take statistics about the Great Depression, nearly 25% of men and women between ages 16-64 were unemployed from 1929-1941, and give them a voice through quotes that vacillates somewhere between despair and sheer determination makes the pictures and words just that more captivating to gaze over.

The impact on the family and children was seen in nearly every school across the country. “Another boy, Fred Batten, wore no socks, and often that winter the skin of his ankles was raw and swollen. One day he caught me looking at his bare ankles, and he turned away from me in silence.” Pictures of children washing in a small metal tub in a dirty farm house, or living in a shanty house in Herrin, IL, and schools districts closing for a school year or more due to lack of local funding really brings the depravity of the situation home to the reader.

Friedman also captures the courage of the Okies from California who leave Oklahoma and arrive destitute in California looking for arable land. They are ostracized by the local farmers in California living in makeshift settlements by ditches near farm roads, but when WWII ends a good portion of these Okies will regain their dignity by become journalists, doctors, and teachers.

Graphic photos of boxcar boys hopping a freight car and risking injury, amputation, or even death by misjudging the train’s speed again highlights how desperate these boys and girls family’s lives clearly must have been during this era. “Children of the Great Depression” includes chapter notes which provides captions for each picture, a selected bibliography of sources, picture sources, and an index.

• Although this book was published in 2005, only one internet source is provided:,
• Certainly other teacher friendly or websites about the Great Depression could have been provided by the author.
• Other books which may provide students better insight into how children and families survived the Great Depression include “Dear Mrs.

Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression” by Eleanor Roosevelt, “Peanut Butter for Cupcakes: A True Story from the Great Depression” by Donna Nordmark Aviles, and The Great Depression: An Interactive History Adventure” by Mark by Michael Burgan.

Russell Freedman’s Children of the Great Depression compiles information of the depression into one detailed source for young readers. History is delivered to readers through many means-first hand accounts, moving photographs, quotes from historical speeches and political events. I appreciated that most of the book’s focus remained on children.

I could see this being an eye opening read for today’s children, probably best for middle school readers. The text has some challenging vocabulary and difficult content that may need scaffolding for younger readers, but it reads much easier (and was far more engaging) than a textbook.

• I felt as if the author provided interesting details that would draw in children, including many accounts from children at the time that show stark contrast to the lives of most of our students.
• The reader can easily compare the differences of their own lives/time period with the children of the depression.

I enjoyed reading this book, and can see how a younger person would become fascinated by this time period after picking up this text. What really made this book all the more fascinating for me was that my grandmother was a teenager during the 30s, and so she grew up in this time.

I didn’t realize just how fortunate she must have been to be able to graduate from high school in 1936 or thereabouts. This book really opened my eyes to a lot of the nitty gritty details we don’t generally go over in school regarding the Great Depression.I loved the pictures; very few of the people in the photos are smiling, and they look filthy and miserable.

I was slightly jarred at the photo of the young redheaded boy in overalls and no shirt sitting at school reading a book with tiny print, because I’m not used to seeing school kids not wearing shirts. The quote of the little girl telling her teacher “I can’t,

1. It’s my sister’s turn to eat” was especially heartbreaking.
2. This is a quick read but a very informative and incredible one.
3. I would highly recommend it.
4. When I first picked up this book I expected it to be a lot of boring text, just like a textbook.
5. I am so happy I didn’t judge a book by its cover because it ended up being fascinating! The pictures of were so moving that I found myself reading the text so I could know about the picture.

I think this is a great informational text, and if we incorporated more books like this I believe our children will be more willing to learn. As well, students will find this text more relatable because the pictures are of children during this time. Even though the book did contain text, I didn’t find it to be boring.

• Between the title of the chapters, and the language used this book stayed interesting.
• This is one of the first interesting books that I have read about the Great Depression.
• Summary: In this text, Russell Freedman outlines the lives of those who were often forgotten during the Great Depression.
• These lives were those of children who come from many social statuses such as middle-class urban youth, migrant farm laborers, and boxcar kids.

Despite the difference is status, the Great Depression affected these children in similar ways: lack of food and housing, unable to attend school because of the need to work, and parents facing job displacement. Although the time seem unbearable, children still remained hopeful and happy though games, radio shows and songs.

Through primary photographs, documents, letters, firsthand accounts and other elements, the author shed a light on the lives of the youngest generation during this unforgettable era. Evaluation:In this text, the writing is completely factual, direct and straightforward. The information is presented in a logical sequence and organized in chapters.

The text is long, so the book is best read in stages or by individual chapters. Despite the length, the concepts in the text are presented in understandable and well-defined terms. Most terms are followed with an example in an illustration or in text. Most of the language is high-quality and academic, the language that isn’t is from journals, diaries and/or memoirs.

Every artifact included is a primary document. These documents allow the reader to further examine and gain another perspective of life during the Great Depression. Some illustrations both add and clarify the information. Teaching Idea: This text could be used as students learn about the Great Depression.

Because the text is so long, I don’t suggest reading the entire book in class. However, there are dozens of reading excerpts and primary documents that could be used. Since the book is organized in chapters, the teacher can quickly find information that correlates to social studies material.

The majority of the information we have about the great depression is told by an adult or in an adult’s perspective. The reading excerpts can help enhance students understanding of the impact of the great depression because many are written in through a child’s perspective. Therefore, this book can be used as a platform to discuss the affects from another group’s perspective.

Likewise, the primary documents provided more insight on the era because students are able to actually see what happening, how people lived, worked, ate etc. Children of the Great Depression by Russell Freedman is a collaboration of untold accounts of what happened to children, during the Great Depression.

A time where, “in the nation as a whole, 27% of homes lacked refrigeration equipment, 31% had no running water, 32% had an outdoor toilet, and 39% did not have a bathtub or shower.” The book shares stories and experiences of: Boxcar kids, Okies, children of farmers, sharecroppers, children who are still pursuing in education, migrant workers, and more.

All of the given information and stories were gathered, not only from research, but from: diaries, letters, pictures, and memories. These sources and the archival photographs showed readers an emotional meaning in terms of economic and social challenges.

These captured moments in a huge event teaches how grim it directly impacted these resilient children.Even as an older reader who has done research on the Great Depression, it was an eerily positive truth to hear that many of the children who experienced the hardest times felt that they gained “a sense of heightened self-confidence and an understanding of the needs of others” in such hard times.

Reading from multiple children’s perspectives’, this would make for a great and interesting read for young readers learning about the Great Depression. Rather than learning of just statistics, readers are able to sympathize for the children and view themselves if they were to be in their shoes.

1. Being able to relate better would make the learning process much more memorable and impactful.
2. I also love how integrated the sources were with the information.
3. For example, the inclusion of short captions under each pictures.
4. There is also an included: bibliography, index, and end notes.Reflecting onto the book, I would utilize it in a 5th grade classroom.

A powerful tool to discuss The Great Depression for a history lesson/unit or maybe as an option to talk about large events affecting various groups of persons in a country. If for a life/literacy lesson, after reading, have students compare and contrast their lives to the lives of the children mentioned in the book. Summary: The book tells the story of what it was like to be a child affected by The Great Depression. The story tells of the experiences of migrant workers, sharecroppers, Okies, Boxcar kids and more. The photographs were taken by photographers who were employed by the federal government to document the crisis that was happening in our nation.

Evaluation: The book starts off strong with interesting stories that I believe children could relate to, but it begins to feel repetitive towards the end of the book. The book focuses quite a bit on the ability (or inability) of children to attend school during the Great Depression. On page 51 it says that many of the children who experienced the hardest times felt that they gained “a sense of heightened self-confidence and an understanding of the needs of others.” The pictures throughout the book are powerful and do an excellent job of portraying the life that the children who lived through this difficult time experienced.

Teaching Idea: The book is a powerful tool that could be used to discuss The Great Depression and how it affected different people groups within the country. For older students, it could be used as a social studies lesson to infer why the Great Depression affected minorities differently that it did middle class white families.

And of course, it is the ideal resource for explaining how “The New Deal” was able to help families and why World War 2 brought about the true end of the Great Depression. A word of caution: Some photographs include nudity. In the book, Children of the Great Depression, the book uses notes written to President Roosevelt’s wife to explain the suffering that the people endured during the Great Depression.

The primary accounts of the tragedy and losses from the time were expressed through a timeline that explained how people’s lives were affected by the market crash, then the crop shortages, the dust storms, and finally the starvation. The letters that were written by the children, the wives, and the husbands of the great depression helped provide a glimpse into how these citizens felt in a way that a textbook couldn’t explain.

1. Why didn’t the book provide Mrs.
2. Roosevelts responses? Did she respond to the cries for help? I wished the author looked for some type of response from Mrs.
3. Roosevelt for the book.
4. Reading the material, I realized just how terrible it was for the people starving.
5. Reading about the Hooverville’s made me so upset that they literally lived in shacks made from scratch.

As a future teacher, I would use this primary source as an alternative method for teaching about the Great Depression. Children of the Great Depression, by Russell Freedman, is a great account for what children and teenagers went through during the Great Depression. Before, I had only read or heard about adults during this devastating era or families as a whole, never children.

1. Freedman covered every child’s economic problems in this era: children from migrants, upper class youth, boxcar kids, and children struggling for survival.
2. He also covered every aspect of struggles they faced such as starvation and not being able to go to school.
3. He also included diaries, letters, photographs, and first hand accounts.

I found this book hard to read at times because of the content impeded in the words. The photographs included were sometimes eerie because the reader could see actual struggles of children during this era.This would be a great book to incorporate in a 6th grade classroom.

• Students learning about this era wouldn’t have to only read about it in textbooks but can read a great piece of nonfiction.
• However, it may be hard for some children to read.
• My review should reflect the fact that I read this book immediately after reading Freedman’s book on Lewis Hines and his stunning photography of the child labor of the early 1900s.

That book is an absolute knockout.Once again, Freedman’s prose works hand in hand with the stunning photographs taken by photographers as part of the FSA. Without directly alluding to them, Freedman uses them as intricate parts of his narrative, a narrative that would not be complete without them. Children of the Great Depression by Russell Freedman is a fantastic book to read for those of any age. We get to hear stories from children who lived through terrible times in the United States, and we see amazing photographs to accompany the stories being told.

Russell Freedman doesn’t miss. His biographies are always fantastic. He is known as the master of the genre for that very reason! This book won the Golden Kite Award for Nonfiction in 2005. Definitely a must-read for all of my History fans out there! We read this book aloud as a family. The children enjoyed the photos and were blown away by the ages and accounts of some of the children.

This was a great resource for making history really come alive for them. A lot of nonfiction books can come across as dry fact dumps- this book and photography did a wonderful job of making it more personal in a way that kept the children’s attention and sparked lots of great questions and discussion.

Also touched on the Dust bowl, real “railway children”, government aid and the varied opinions, racism and discrimination) I was personally inspired by some of the accounts of what these children faced and overcame on a daily basis; eye-opening perspective for all of us. A massive hardship we’d all do well to remember and glean from.

Title: Children of the Great DepressionAuthor: Russell FreedmanIllustrator: Russell FreedmanGenre: Orbis Pictus bookTheme(s): History, social conditions, depressions, looking on the bright side, resilienceOpening line/sentence:The cold reality of America’s Great Depression was brought home to one twelve-year-old boy in 1931 when he came upon his father in the empty coal bin of the family’s Brookline, Massachusetts, house.Brief Book Summary:Using information from diaries, letters, and memories, the author of Children of the Great Depression teaches the readers about the lives of children during the great depression.

Children at this time were often unable to go to school due to the fact that they had to work or did not have a teacher, had limited food and shelter, and constantly worried about what was going to change in their lives next. Even though these were very hard times for children, they liked the jobs they were in and felt independent while doing it.

Most kids were able to still stay positive about how their future would be.Professional Recommendation/Review #1: Hazel Rochman (Booklist, Dec.15, 2005 (Vol.102, No.8)) It’s my sister’s turn to eat,” a hungry child tells her teacher. Quotes like that one bring home what it was like to be young and poor in Depression America.

1. This stirring photo-essay combines such unforgettable personal details with a clear historical overview of the period and black-and-white photos by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and many others.
2. As Freedman says, these images “convey in human terms the true meaning of economic statistics.” His signature plainspoken prose does that, too, on every spacious, double-page spread, whether he is focusing on differences of race and class or on child sharecroppers, factory workers, migrant farm laborers, or boxcar kids.

There are many books about particular people and regions during this period-among them, Jerry Stanley’s Children of the Dust Bowl (1992); Milton Meltzer’s Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (1991); and Freedman’s own award-winning biographies of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt-and Freedman quotes from a number of them, as well as from adult sources, documenting everything in a final bibliographic essay and notes that are a rich part of the story, not the usual cramped, dutiful acknowledgments.

1. An excellent starting place for investigating the Depression in middle school and junior high, this eloquent book will also appeal to older readers, including adults who know family stories about how it was or, possibly, lived the history themselves.
2. Category: Books for Middle Readers-Nonfiction.2005, Clarion, $20.

Gr.5-8. Starred Review (PUBLISHER: Clarion Books (New York:), PUBLISHED: c2005.) Professional Recommendation/Review #2:Michael L. Cooper (Children’s Literature) It will be a cold day in a hot place before you read a bad review of a Russell Freedman book.

The man is a master of writing nonfiction who, in a career of nearly a half-century, has won every major award. Freedman s latest book explains what life was like for American kids in the 1930s. Many children were poor and homeless. And many did not go to school, often because schools had closed or lacked teachers.

It can be an agonizing tale, as with the Okies in California who had to endure public scorn as they scrambled to earn a dollar or two a day. But it is not always a depressing read. Many kids sold newspapers, shined shoes, or did other menial jobs and enjoyed their independence.

In a clever touch, Freedman includes a fun chapter on popular movies, music, and radio programs of the 1930s. As with all of Freedman’s 2 books, this one is chocked full of sharp and interesting black-and-white photographs. My only quibble is that the list of web sites in the bibliography is anemic.2005, Clarion/Houghton Mifflin, $20.00.

Ages 9 up. (PUBLISHER: Clarion Books (New York:), PUBLISHED: c2005.) Response to Two Professional Reviews:Both reviewers discussed the importance of the author adding actual quotes from the children that were featured in this book. The first reviewer says how it is very interesting that the author tells the story from children’s perspectives.

1. This really makes learning about the Great Depression more interesting to children because they can now relate to it better.
2. The reviewers also talk about how the author focuses on how the Great Depression effected people of different race and social class.
3. Evaluation of Literary Elements:I really like how the author used actual diaries and memories of the children featured in this book.

This allows students to really relate with the characters in this book and makes the book seem more real. The pictures help readers make connections with the characters in the story. Actually seeing the children in this story makes this book more engaging and allows reader to actually visualize what life was really like during this time span.Consideration of Instructional Application: In my 4th-5th grade classroom, I would use this book during a history lesson to teach my students about the Great Depression.

• Before reading this book, my class would come up with what a typical week for a fourth grader would be.
• This would include the activities they did and the everyday worries they had.
• Then I would have my students read this book and have them use sticky notes to compare and contrast their lives to the lives of the children in this book.

In small groups, the children would create a Venn diagram. After this is made, the children will turn the Venn diagram they made with their partners into a short paper. This informational social studies book provided black and white photographs as well written descriptions of the various situations that Children in the Great Depression faced.

Some children were no longer able to attend school because of not having warm clothes or food. Other children looked for jobs shining shoes, working as migrants on farms, working in factories. Still other children ran away and took to a life of hopping trains and living where ever the train would take them.

Many children wrote the President’s wife, E. Roosevelt. As the country began to rebound the government provided programs to assist with employment. This book is filled with amazing photographs of the Depression Era. I have read a lot of books about this period, but none, so far, that really made the people real.

1. What an awful time in American history, when not even the government to help the millions who were out of work, homeless, and starving.
2. I will continue to read more on this topic, thanks to the websites and other book suggestions at the end of the book.
3. This book should be included in the schoolroom curriculum for all children.

Most children, today, have no idea how good they have it. This informational book about the Great Depression is perfect for a social studies unit. Children of the era began unable to help their parents make money, to ones who dropped out of school in order to find work. Being without much, allowed them to get creative when having fun and take to radio shows for entertainment.

Pictures throughout the book show the despair and living conditions forced upon the children of the time. Children of the great depression depicts the plight of the children who lived and suffered though the Great Depression. First person accounts of children not being able to go to school or even have the money for graduation, in this informational book the images speak louder than words as they capture the despair and resignation of the times, but also the childlike hope of better times.

Full of stunning pictures taken during the 30s, Children of the Great Depression tells the story of (mostly) poor children and their plight during the worst economic downturn in American history. It is short, but still packed with information. I recommend it to kids who are studying the Great Depression.

• Gosh, it sure seemed decadent to read this while lounging on the couch eating Combos.
• This was an interesting read of a particularly difficult time in American history: the Great Depression.
• The level of pain and hardship endured is a struggle to imagine.
• I don’t remember why I put this book on my to-read list.

I would’ve liked to see more photos. This book is about children that lived during the Great Depression. I thought this was an interesting twist on history as usually we learn about adults and what they had to go through. I thought this allowed students to see what it was like living during that time and what other people had to go through. This informational social studies picture book recounts the stories of children during the Great Depression. Through black and white photos and real accounts, the story of how children survived severe poverty comes to life. This 2006 Orbis Pictus Award-winning book includes photographs of both white and people of color.

• I think the photographs will keep students interested in reading and learning.
• I would recommend it for fourth-grade students and older.
• This book is great! Gives all kinds of good information and the pictures are wonderful! My favorite part of the book was the prices stuff cost for a normal shopping list of things and the average salary and what the person did for a living! Interesting stories and pictures.

Children of the Great Depression is written by Russell Freedman. The book won the 2006 NCTE Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children. The book, whose intended audience is fifth grade and up, is nonfiction and was published in 2005. Freedman shares what life was like for children growing up during the Depression.

1. The book sheds light on the horrible living conditions, lack of shelter and food, and no schooling that the children experienced.
2. Freedman very effectively uses both real black and white photos and quotes from children that lived during the Great Depression to describe the world as it was in that time.

The stories are so real that it draws the reader in and makes the reader really feel how terrible it must have been. In addition, the photos allow the reader to look into the eyes of the children thus creating a feeling of sadness for them and appreciation for what the children of today have and take for granted.

The theme of sadness is developed very well and carried out throughout the book. The children look sad, their clothing is dirty (or missing), and they take turns eating depending upon whose turn it may be to eat. Even though the book is an easy read, when working with children a chapter by chapter discussion would be beneficial so that the children can share their feelings about life back then.

Many children may not realize the hardships the children and families experienced. This book is highly recommended. I thought of my dad throughout the book. He was born in 1929 and I wish I could have asked him questions of his childhood. great book with lots of photographs Displaying 1 – 30 of 150 reviews Get help and learn more about the design.
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