Group Two: Migrant Workers and Rail Riders

Essential Questions
You may include more information in your presentation, but please be sure to cover these points as a minimum.

Note: Focus on the experiences of migrant workers and rail riders in the 1930s so as not to duplicate the work of the other group.

• Who were the migrant workers and rail riders of the 1930s? What are “Okies”? How many migrant laborers were there during the Great Depression?
  
• What was the Dust Bowl and what did it have to do with migrant labor?
  
• Why did people have to move so often? What kind of a lifestyle was it?
  
• How many teenagers rode the rails during the Great Depression? What kind of a lifestyle was it and why did some people choose it?

Recommended Resources
You may need to go beyond what is listed here, but I’ve included a few ideas to get you started. You will need to cite all sources used at the end of your presentation, so keep track carefully.

• Your history textbook
  
• The Library of Congress website:
  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/tsme.html
  
• This scanned scrapbook, available from the Library of Congress, has amazing primary source articles:
  http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=afcts&fileName=sb001/sb001.db&recNum=0
  
• The PBS series “Riding the Rails”:
  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rails/
  
• Be sure to check out their timeline here:
  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rails/timeline/index.html
  
• Also, don’t miss the “Tales from the Rails” section; you might share a specific story or two with the class:
  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rails/sfeature/tales.html
  
• The PBS documentary Surviving the Dust Bowl:
  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl/
  
• The Modern American Poetry site:
  http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/depression/dustbowl.htm
  
• Online and print encyclopedias, such as MSN’s Encarta:
  http://encarta.msn.com
  
• Media Center Databases:
  http://www.arlington.k12.ma.us/ahs/mediacenter/databases/databases.htm