Hoover and the Depression:
1929 - 1933

	Greg Carter -- Lisbon High School, 235 West School Street, Lisbon, Iowa 52253 James L. Tursi -- Prairie High School, College Community Schools, 401 76th Avenue SW, Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52404

These lessons correlate to the National History Standards.

ERA 8: THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND WORLD WAR II (1929-1945)

Standard 1: The causes of the Great Depression and how it affected American society.

1A Student understands the causes of the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

1B Student understands how American life changed during the 1930s.

This project is designed to encourage the use of primary documents in the teaching of history with secondary students. The documents are online in their original form and may be printed and reproduced for classroom use.

Learning Objectives

To help students to increase their understanding and appreciation of the American heritage.

To help students to visualize and empathize with people of other times and places.

To help students to understand the process whereby historians write history.

To help students to acquire the ability to analyze, synthesize and evaluate the primary documents to determine bias, relevance, fact-opinion and usefulness in decision making.

To help students apply content knowledge and critical thinking skills to their everyday social, economic and political decision making.

Suggested Activities

To demonstrate how historians use primary documents to write history.

How do historians find (Hoover Library), select which documents to included (research) and evaluate (questioning strategies)?

Social Education 48, 1, 58-59 by Mary Elizabeth Perry and Ellen Stenski.

To learn how to analyze original source documents using Barry K. Beyer's model.

To write a traditional research paper on selected topics: "Bonus March," "Hoover's volunteerism concept," etc.

To create an audio/visual culminating performance as an individual or a group using primary documents.


i.e. "Hoover and the trickle down theory to end the Depression"

As the basis for a small group cooperative discussion

i.e. "Fishbowl Discussion Group"

As the basis for an empathetic/creative class activity.

i.e. Create a journal, diary, letter to demonstrate how the Depression affected people.

i.e. Create a cartoon, drawing, or a visual timeline on some topic of interest.