Year 8 WPS "OMAM" context Flashcards
He was born in the Salinas valley in California, where Of Mice and Men is set. He spent some time working on farms and this gave him ideas for some of his novels; he had done jobs similar to those of George and Lennie. His novels about the lives of the poor and vulnerable were very successful: he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962.
John Steinbeck
In the 1920’s, a lot of Americans borrowed money to invest in stocks - small shares of American companies - to make a profit. However, when the value of these companies went down, many Americans could not pay back their loans, and ended up losing their savings. This hit a historic low on ‘Black Thursday’ in 1929, when the stock market (the value of all the companies in America) crashed (lost a lot of its value very suddenly.) In a domino effect, businesses closed and many people become so poor they couldn’t eat.
The Wall Street Crash
A series of droughts (lack of rain) in states like Kansas and Oklahoma led to failed harvests and dried-up land. Farmers were forced to move off their land by banks. Many people were persuaded to move to ‘Golden’ California by leaflets sent by farms saying they needed workers. Because there were so many workers, they workers could be paid very little, sometime just a bit of food. Around these areas, many people were so poor that they starved to death.
The Dust Bowl
Someone who moves from job to job and this means they don’t have a permanent home. They are different from migrant workers, who leave the part of the country that they’re from (e.g. the Dust Bowl states in the midwest) to work in a different place (e.g. California).
Itinerant workers
The overall name to the 1930’s in America, when up to 30% of the population lost their jobs, and many became homeless.
The Great Depression
A term invented by James Truslow Adams, an American writer and historian, who wrote in 1931 that ‘life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.’ The essence is that everyone has an equal chance at ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, as the American Declaration of Independence puts it. In reality, however, some Americans had much better opportunities than others.
The American Dream
Since the end of slavery in 1865, many of the states in the south of the USA had practiced segregation: making it legal to force blacks and whites to live separately and use separate public facilities such as schools, shops, buses and hospitals.
Segregation
Named after a racist theatre character, these made segregation legal. In Louisiana black people were ‘separate but equal’ and this idea was used to justify how segregation did not break the US Constitution, which states that all US citizens have ‘equal protection’
The Jim Crow Laws
In the 1920s, the ‘Golden Age’, ordinary young women became huge film stars, living lives of glamour even during the hard times of the Great Depression. Many women started to dream of this easy route to riches, even though most would never make it.
Women in Hollywood
In the 1920’rights had improved dramatically in America: they had gained the vote in 1928, and many had worked in important roles in the First World War. However, the Great Depression reversed many of these trends, and they were expected largely to be housewives and raise children, as jobs for men were scarce.
Status of women in the 1920’s and 1930’s
