The Emotional Life of the Great Depression

The book explores how those in and out of power responded emotionally to the crisis of the Great Depression as it unfolded in the United States across the 1930s. It also explores how those emotional responses influenced policy. The book acknowledges the conventional emotions of the Great Depression (despair, fear, hope), but it also uncovers emotions that have gone relatively understudied, such as righteousness, panic, awe, and love. The result is a new take on the Great Depression, one that emphasizes its major events (bank panics, unemployment, the Dust Bowl) but also, and perhaps even more so, its sensibilities and its structures of feeling.