Diane Ravitch’s indispensable Twitter account informed me of a new searchable trove of the photographs of the Great Depression compiled in a government project as part of FDR’s New Deal.
The Library of Congress holds the famous photos. Now Yale University has put together a program that allows searches of the collection of photographs. You may search for images by a particular photographer, say Dorothea Lange’s 32,000 shots. You may also search the archive geographically. Many were taken in Arkansas.
Here, for example, is a link to 68 photos taken in the era in Pulaski County. You could spend hours in this.
Here’s Russell Lee’s 1938 photo of children in the Lakeview Project in Phillips County. The Lakeview School District is famous as the lead plaintiff in the landmark lawsuit over the state’s unequal support of education.