Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were two criminals who were well known during the Great Depression during the public enemy era. They mostly robbed gas stations or small stores and occasionally robbed banks and were responsible for several murders, nine of which were police officers. Ambushed in Louisiana by the police, they were shot almost 50 times and killed. 
I found this and thought it was hilarious. Its reflection of sexist gender roles is pretty obvious here and hopefully doesn't need me to be pointed out. I think this is generally reflective of an attitude of the time, however. Women were required to adhere to a strict set of social codes that dictated how they dressed, spoke, presented themselves, ate and drank, and acted. The standards were mostly for the benefit of pleasing or looking appealing to men. It seems not much has changed, huh? Maybe the codes have changed, but strict guidelines for how to dress, act, and speak are still hanging over women's heads today for the benefit of heterosexual men's pleasure.
Ansel Adams was one of the most influential photographers of the twenty first century. He developed a great number of techniques for creating and developing photos. He collaborated with many different famous artists throughout his career and played an essential part both the movement to establish photography as art and to differentiate it from other mediums. 
The Golden Gate Bridge opened to transit in the year 1937. It connected the city of San Francisco to Marin County and Oakland. At the time it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It's length has since been surpassed by eight other bridges but it remains the second largest suspension bridge in the United States. | Population: 123,188,000 in 48 states |
| Life Expectancy: Male, 58.1; Female, 61.6 |
| Average salary: $1,368 |
| Unemployment rises to 25% |
| Huey Long proposes a guaranteed annual income of $2,500 |
| Car Sales: 2,787,400 |
| Food Prices: Milk, 14 cents a qt.; Bread, 9 cents a loaf; Round Steak, 42 cents a pound Gas: .10-.17 cents a gallon What really stands out from this list is the price of gas. A gallon of gas was between .10 to .17 cents in the thirties. Nowadays the average price of gas is around $3.90. It seems like .10 cents for a gallon of gas is nothing! The price of gas back then was reasonable for the time period. If gas has risen from .10 cents in the thirties and $3.90 currently, it makes you wonder where it's going next. |
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow, I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America.
This poem written by Langston Hughes was penned in 1925, so it was a bit before the thirties but remains relevant even to this day.This is one of my favorite poems and it is about civil rights. Although the other inhabitants of the house are ashamed of the darker brother and send him to eat where he will be unseen by others, he still remains optimistic about a better tomorrow. Every person, regardless of race or appearance or anything as superficial as that, is America. I see the people of the house as representative of this country in that time period and company is representative of the self we (being the United States) choose to present tothe outside world. (I keep struggling with formatting and my block of text kept ending up as one very long line of text. The only way I found to separate
text was to do this weird spacing. Sorry!)
1. Joe Louis:"The Brown Bomber" Joe Louis is the natural choice to head a list of 1930s heavyweights. Louis was not just the dominant champ of the 1930s - if you consider how infrequently past champs fought, he was the first truly dominant and busy heavyweight champion period. He consistently comes in as either the #1 or #2 heavyweight of all time.
2. Max Baer:Baer stands as the great underachieving clown prince of heavyweight boxing. He possessed brilliant talent - Jack Dempsey himself thought so - and we saw a glimpse of what Baer could have after he pulled himself back together from the Frankie Campbell tragedy. Under the tutelage of Dempsey, he beat Paulino Uzcudun and Tuffy Griffiths, and stopped both Max Schmeling and Primo Carnera
3. Max Schmeling: It is interesting to think about would have happened if Schmeling had not been fleeced in the stinky, rigged decision in his rematch with Jack Sharkey. That was the bout that prompted Schmeling's manager to famously declare "we wuz robbed!" Despite what the record books say, Max "The Black Uhlan" Schmeling beat Sharkey twice, and it is likely he could have beaten off a challenge from Primo Carnera too.
4. Primo Carnera: Primo Carnera is best known for his connection to the mafia, and it is frequently alleged that he owes all his wins to criminal machinations. While some of his fights were perhaps rightly tainted by allegations of corruption, obviously not all of them were. To even claim the world title in the first place, he had to knock out Jack Sharkey.
5. Jim Braddock: The number 5 slot was comes down to a contest between "The Bulldog of Bergen" Braddock and Jack Sharkey. That Braddock is here actually says more about Sharkey's lack of top qualifications than it does about Braddock's own accomplishments. Contrary to what the film The Cinderella Man would have the world believe, the only true contender he met on his way to challenge Max Baer was John Henry Lewis.
Cited Work
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1060843/the_top_5_heavyweights_of_the_1930s.html?cat=37. 5/31/2011
Ben Shahn was born in Kaunus, Lithuania in 1898. He emigrated to the United States in 1906 with his family. He became a lithographer’s apprentice after he finished his schooling. He later returned to school for art and design training. In the 1920s he became part of the social realism movement. This term is used to describe the works of American artists during the Depression era that devoted their talents to depicting the social problems of the suffering lower classes like urban decay, labor strikes, and poverty.
I think his most striking works are his street photography all taken between 1932 and 1935. They helped define urban life in the 1930s through the prosaic daily activities of ordinary people. He used a handheld 35 mm, Leica camera, and photographed everyday life in Manhattan. The images illustrate unemployment, poverty and protest. Shahn’s photographs also inspired most of the work he is more widely known for: socially conscious paintings and graphic works, as well as public mural projects that promoted social reform programs of the time.
Aaron Copland was born on November 14, 1900 in Brooklyn as the youngest of five children. His sisters taught him how to play the piano when he was eleven years old. As a young man he went to France to study at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, where he studies with Nadia Boulanger. He was inspired by Schoenberg, Bartok, Ravel, and Stravinsky. In 1924 he completed his studies and returned to the U.S.
The 1920s and 1930s were a period of deep concern for Copland. He worried about the limited audience for new, and especially American music. He was active in many organizations devoted to performance and sponsorship of new music. These included, the Copland-Sessions concerts, the American Composers’ Alliance, and the League of Composers. His fellow composer Virgil Thomson nicknamed him “American music’s natural president.”
Beginning in the mid 1930s Copland made a serious effort to widen the audience for American music. He took steps by changing his style when writing pieces for different occasions. He composed for theater, ballet, and films as well as more traditional concert settings. In his ballet “Billy the Kid” (1938) he uses folk melodies to be broadly recognized as “American.”
Copland’s concern for establishing a tradition of music in American life only increased throughout his life. He taught at Harvard and published several books. He died in 1990. He has been remembered as a man who encouraged composers to find their own voice, no matter the style, just as he did for sixty years.
In the 1930s he was considered a leader in avant-garde music. He mostly composed pieces for percussion groups and for what was called “prepared piano.” A prepared piano is a piano with various objects inserted between the strings for percussive effects (click on the link to watch someone prepare a piano, it’s insane!). He used erasers, washers, screws, and whatever he had on hand.
He is known for pushing the boundaries of music and always referred to his career as “an exploration of non-intention.” Schoenberg hated all of his students and never said anything about any of them except for Cage. “John Cage is not a composer, but an inventor of genius.”
As our comes to a close, I wanted to share with everyone my favorite article for the website Paleofuture. It discusses a Radio-Newspaper Receiver, that would transmit (and print out) the news for you to read at home. I love the idea of this device, because it suggests that people were thinking about the possibility of mass-communication, and how audio, text and image could someday merge in a way that would be available at home. Not only is it the Inter-Web-A-Tron of the day, but it seems to have inspired these ideas as well. Plus: I love the picture. 
While the articles on King Kong were handed out in class, it was pointed out that not everyone got a copy of them. So I have them available here for download. They are pdf files, and contain a scan of the pages from The New York Times that these articles appeared in. 
