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Dust bowl migrants in the American imagination
Author
Title
Dust bowl migrants in the American imagination [electronic resource] / Charles J. Shindo.
ISBN
9780700608102
Publication
Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, [1997]
Copyright Notice Date
Ã1997
Physical Description
1 online resource (xv, 252 pages) : illustrations ; 25 cm.
Local Notes
Access is available to the Yale community.
Notes
Electronic text and image data. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan, Michigan Publishing, 2022. EPUB file. ([ACLS Humanities E-Book])
Access and use
Access restricted by licensing agreement.
Summary
More than any other event of the 1930s, the migration of thousands of jobless and dispossessed Americans from the Dust Bowl states to the "promised land" of California evokes the hardships and despair of the Great Depression. In this innovative new study, Charles Shindo shows how public memory of that migration has been dominated not by academic historians but by a handful of artists and reformers. Shindo examines the images of Dust Bowl migrants in photography, fiction, film, and song and marks off the various distances between these representations and the realities of migrant lives. He shows how photographer Dorothea Lange, novelist John Steinbeck, Hollywood filmmaker John Ford, and folksinger Woody Guthrie, as well as folklorists and government reformers, sympathized with the migrants' plight but also appropriated that experience to further their own aesthetic and ideological agendas. Lange's "Migrant Mother" and other photos, the powerful story of the Joad family in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Ford's poetic cinematic adaptation of that novel, and the gritty plainfolk lyrics of Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads have all combined to portray the migrants as down-and-out victims of the Great Depression. Shindo, however, contends that these artists failed to fully grasp the essence of "Okie" culture and were more concerned with promoting views and agendas that the migrants themselves might have found inaccurate or unappealing.
Variant and related titles
ACLS Humanities eBooks.
Other formats
Online version: Shindo, Charles J. Dust bowl migrants in the American imagination. Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, Ã1997
Format
Books / Online
Language
English
Added to Catalog
September 05, 2024
Series
Rural America
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-246) and index.
Contents
Displaced voices : the migrants as American victims
The ideals of American democracy : New Deal reformers and the migrant
The passion and the humanity : Dorothea Lange and Migrant worker
The perfectibility of man : John Steinbeck and The grapes of wrath
Photo essay: Introducing Americans to America : the image of the migrants
The world-old desire to tell a story : John Ford and The grapes of wrath
The things that you fight for : Woody Guthrie and the Dust Bowl ballads
The uses of American culture : folklorists and the migrant
The ghost of Tom Joad : the persistence of Dust Bowl representations.
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