Farm Security Administration (FSA)

During the New Deal, the U.S. knew that economic recovery depended upon housing.

Of the 270,000 photos commissioned to document the Great Depression, more than a third were “killed.” Explore the hole-punched archive and the void at its center.

A web-based visualization platform for exploring the 170,000 photos taken by U.S. government agencies during the Great Depression.

How the preeminent photographic record of the period excluded people of color from the nation’s self-image.

Hard thinking on difficult and uncomfortable questions about how to keep everything from falling apart.

A recent biography reveals the many contradictions of the photographer who fastidiously documented postwar American life.

Dorothea Lange created a vast archive of the twentieth century’s crises in America. For years her work was censored, misused, impounded, or simply rejected.

The Resettlement Administration was one of the New Deal’s most radical, far-reaching, and highly criticized programs, and it lasted just two years.

Photography as History in the U.S. South.

The complex backstory of one of the most famous images of the Great Depression.

A handful of images from Chicago as it was some 75 years ago.

The fear and hysteria that led to Japanese interment during World War II was manufactured for corporate profit.

John Steinbeck based “The Grapes of Wrath” on Sanora Babb’s notes. But she was writing her own American epic.

John Steinbeck beat Sanora Babb to the great American Dust Bowl novel—using her field notes. What do we owe her today?

Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, "American Gothic," was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.

Two new books and one expanded edition of Gordon Parks' photographs look at the work of the photographer from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

There was once a thriving Black middle class based on farm ownership. But during the twentieth century, the USDA helped erase that source of wealth.

An architectural historian invites us to sit with her awhile on the American porch.

2020 was full of efforts to archive photos and artifacts of the pandemic — an impulse born of a sense of witnessing history, and a desire to speak to the future.

On the Black labor organizers who fought for civil rights after Reconstruction and through the twentieth century.

In the 1930s, Americans responded to economic calamity by creating a richer and more equitable society. We can do it again.

White families quickly recuperated financial losses after the Civil War, then created a Jim Crow credit system.

The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms.

The myth that Appalachia is uniformly White lingers, but communities of “Affrilachians” were documented in the 1930s.

The Popular Front and American culture.

Sixty-five years after Russell Lee photographed New Mexico homesteaders coping with the Depression, a Lee admirer visits the town for a fresh slice of life