Any information on the Great Depression?

Question

Im doing an assignment on the great depression and I need to know what food people ate, what they wore, were they lived ect. any information would be helpful as I havent got anything yet

Answer 1

You can start your research here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_depre...

During the Depression, a lot of people who had always been middle class or wealthy found themselves very poor.

They sometimes went hungry. Soup kitchens had long lines of people waiting for the free soup. They ate simple, inexpensive foods, things poor people had always eaten. So instead of steak, they ate a lot of beans. Soup was a way to make what meat and vegetables they had go farther.

Instead of getting the latest fashions every year, they wore their clothes as long as they could and patched them when they had to. Children wore the hand-me-downs of their older brothers and sisters once those kids outgrew them. Really poor people would reuse the burlap bags that their flour and grains came in as clothes.

Probably most people continued to live in their houses, but if they couldn't afford to, they sometimes rented rooms or worked in exchange for a place to sleep. Some young adults took to being tramps, stowing away on trains going back and forth across the country. Some kids ended up in orphanages. I'm not sure whether poorhouses still existed, but that would be another place they might have stayed.

Answer 2

The Great Depression was a dramatic, worldwide economic downturn starting in most places in 1929 and ending at different times in the 1930s for different countries. It was the largest and most important economic depression in world history, and is used in the 21st century as a benchmark on how far a modern economy could possibly fall. The Great Depression originated in the United States; historians most often use as a starting date the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday. The end of the depression in the U.S. is associated with the onset of the war economy of World War II, beginning around 1939.

My grandparents grew up in the great depression. All I've personally been told was my grandma would sometimes only eat one thing a day. If she was lucky it was a cupcake from the store because they were cheap.