The years 1929-1941 were in the aggregate, the most technologically progressive of any comparable period in US economic history. This hypothesis entails two primary claims: 1. that during this period ...businesses and govenrment contractors implemented or adopted on a more widespread basis a wide range of new technologies and practices, resulting in the highest rate of measured peacetime peak-to-peak multifactor productivity growth in the century, and 2. that the Depression years produced advances that replenished and expanded the larder of unexploited or only partially exploited techniques, thus providing the basis for much of the labor and multifactor producivity improvment of the 1950's and 1960's. The 1929-1948 period is critical in understanding the long-term trajectrory of technological change in the US, both because of its direct effect on growth during the period and because of its lagged effect on multifactor productivity advance in the 1950s which when coupled with renewed capital deepening, produced a golden age of labor productivity growth and living standard improvement.
During the 1930s, the world of photography was unsettled, exciting, and boisterous. John Raeburn's A Staggering Revolution recreates the energy of the era by surveying photography's rich variety of ...innovation, exploring the aesthetic and cultural achievements of its leading figures, and mapping the paths their pictures blazed public's imagination. _x000B_While other studies of thirties photography have concentrated on the documentary work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), no previous book has considered it alongside so many of the decade's other important photographic projects. A Staggering Revolution includes individual chapters on Edward Steichen's celebrity portraiture; Berenice Abbott's Changing New York project; the Photo League's ethnography of Harlem; and Edward Weston's western landscapes, made under the auspices of the first Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to a photographer. It also examines Margaret Bourke_White's industrial and documentary pictures, the collective undertakings by California's Group f.64, and the fashion magazine specialists, as well as the activities of the FSA and the Photo League. _x000B_Raeburn's expansive study explains how the democratic atmosphere of thirties photography nourished innovation and encouraged new heights of artistic achievement. It also produced the circumstances that permitted artful photography to become such a thriving public enterprise during the decade. A Staggering Revolution offers an illuminating analysis of the sociology of photography's art world and its galleries and exhibitions, but also demonstrates the importance of the novel venues created by impresarios and others that proved essential to photography's extraordinary dissemination. These new channels, including camera magazines and annuals, volumes of pictures enhanced by text, and omnibus exhibitions in unconventional spaces, greatly expanded photography's cultural visibility. They also made its enthusiastic audience larger and more heterogeneous than ever before - or since.
Revolution on My Mind Hellbeck, Jochen
2009, 2006, 2006., 2006-01-01, 20060101
eBook
Revolution on My Mind is a stunning revelation of the inner world of Stalin's Russia. We see into the minds and hearts of Soviet citizens who recorded their lives during an extraordinary period of ...revolutionary fervor and state terror. Writing a diary, like other creative expression, seems nearly impossible amid the fear and distrust of totalitarian rule; but as Jochen Hellbeck shows, diary-keeping was widespread, as individuals struggled to adjust to Stalin's regime.Rather than protect themselves against totalitarianism, many men and women bent their will to its demands, by striving to merge their individual identities with the collective and by battling vestiges of the old self within. We see how Stalin's subjects, from artists to intellectuals and from students to housewives, absorbed directives while endeavoring to fulfill the mandate of the Soviet revolution—re-creation of the self as a builder of the socialist society. Thanks to a newly discovered trove of diaries, we are brought face to face with individual life stories—gripping and unforgettably poignant.The diarists' efforts defy our liberal imaginations and our ideals of autonomy and private fulfillment. These Soviet citizens dreamed differently. They coveted a morally and aesthetically superior form of life, and were eager to inscribe themselves into the unfolding revolution. Revolution on My Mind is a brilliant exploration of the forging of the revolutionary self, a study without precedent that speaks to the evolution of the individual in mass movements of our own time.
In Georgia during the Great Depression, jobless workers united with the urban poor, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers. In a collective effort that cut across race and class boundaries, they ...confronted an unresponsive political and social system and helped shape government policies. James J. Lorence adds significantly to our understanding of this movement, which took place far from the northeastern and midwestern sites we commonly associate with Depression-era labor struggles. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly accessible records of the Communist Party of the United States, Lorence details interactions between various institutional and grassroots players, including organized labor, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, liberal activists, and officials at every level of government. He shows, for example, how the Communist Party played a more central role than previously understood in the organization of the unemployed and the advancement of labor and working-class interests in Georgia. Communists gained respect among the jobless, especially African Americans, for their willingness to challenge officials, help negotiate the welfare bureaucracy, and gain access to New Deal social programs. Lorence enhances our understanding of the struggles of the poor and unemployed in a Depression-era southern state. At the same time, we are reminded of their movement's lasting legacy: the shift in popular consciousness that took place as Georgians, "influenced by a new sense of entitlement fostered by the unemployed organizations," began to conceive of new, more-equal relations with the state.
During the Great Depression, people from across the political spectrum sought to ground American identity in the rural know-how of “the folk.” At the same time, certain writers, filmmakers, and ...intellectuals combined documentary and satire into a hybrid genre that revealed the folk as an anxious product of corporate capitalism, rather than an antidote to commercial culture. In Real Folks, Sonnet Retman analyzes the invention of the folk as figures of authenticity in the political culture of the 1930s, as well as the critiques that emerged in response. Diverse artists and intellectuals—including the novelists George Schuyler and Nathanael West, the filmmaker Preston Sturges, and the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston—illuminated the fabrication and exploitation of folk authenticity in New Deal and commercial narratives. They skewered the racist populisms that prevented interracial working-class solidarity, prophesized the patriotic function of the folk for the nation-state in crisis, and made their readers and viewers feel self-conscious about the desire for authenticity. By illuminating the subversive satirical energy of the 1930s, Retman identifies a rich cultural tradition overshadowed until now by the scholarly focus on Depression-era social realism.
This essential guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal provides a wealth of information, analysis, biographical profiles, primary documents and current resources that will help students to ...understand this pivotal era in American history. The author, an expert on this age of U.S. history and politics, brings to life the traumatic period that began in 1929 and ended only with America's entrance into World War II in 1941. He carefully explains the causes of the Depression, the actions taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt to lift America out of its economic morass, and the economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of the age.Following a chronology of events, a narrative overview examines the events of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Other topical essays address the causes and cure of the Depression, America's struggle against the Depression, the effect of the Depression on American politics, changes in society and culture during the Depression decade, and an evaluation of the New Deal from a contemporary perspective. Twenty-seven biographical profiles of key figures of the era, the text of ten important primary documents, a glossary of frequently cited terms, and an annotated bibliography of print and nonprint materials for student use complete the work. This work is an essential source for the most current thinking and resources on the Great Depression and the New Deal.
This article examines how monetary policy can be conducted when short-term interest rates reach the zero bound and whether policy is likely to be effective in this situation. The article suggests ...that concerns about the zero bound as a constraint on monetary policy are greatly exaggerated. Even when short-term interest rates are near zero, central banks will generally have considerable scope to expand bank credit and to lower longer-term interest rates. And, in the event the banking system does not function effectively or long-term rates also reach zero, further options are available to provide policy stimulus. Moreover, a closer look at the historical experience in the US and Japan suggests that the central problem in these situations was not the existence of a zero bound per se but, rather, a weakened banking system that limited the effectiveness of monetary policy.
PDF
