1. Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck

2. Signs of the Times
Of Mice and Men takes place during the mid-1930’s, a time of great discontentment in our nation.
Of Mice and Men is a novella by John Steinbeck, published in Steinbeck based this story on his own experiences while working alongside migrant farmworkers as a teenager in the 1910’s.
This story is set on a ranch in California during the Great Depression. George Milton and Lennie Smalls are just trying to find their place in the world. This proves to be very difficult.

3. George Milton Lennie Smalls
Intelligent (though uneducated)
Hard worker
Looks out for Lennie
Frustrated and aggravated
Wants to avoid trouble
Mentally impaired (simple)
Hard worker
Innocent and child-like
Incredibly strong (but doesn’t seem to realize his own strength)

4. Black Tuesday
The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange just after the crash of On Black Tuesday, October 29th, the market collapsed. In a single day, sixteen million shares were traded--a record--and thirty billion dollars vanished into thin air.

5. Unemployed men vying for jobs at the American Legion Employment Bureau in Los Angeles during the Great Depression.

6. “Squatters”
Squatter's Camp, Route 70, Arkansas, October, Photographer: Ben Shahn
Squatters in Mexican section in San Antonio, Texas. House was built of scrap material in vacant lot in Mexican section of San Antonio, Texas. March Photographer: Russell Lee.

7. Farmer and sons - dust storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936
Farmer and sons - dust storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, The drought that helped cripple agriculture in the Great Depression was the worst in the history of the country. By 1934, it had decimated the Great Plains, from North Dakota to Texas, from the Mississippi River Valley to the Rockies. Vast dust storms swept the region.

8. In one of the largest pea camps in California. February, 1936.
A 'Hooverville' was the popular name for shanty towns built by homeless people during the Great Depression. They were named after the President of the United States at the time, Herbert Hoover because he allegedly let the nation slide into depression.

9. The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience: 
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

10. Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," destitute in a pea picker's camp, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Most of the 2,500 people in this camp were destitute. By the end of the decade there were still 4 million migrants on the road.

11. Unemployed workers in front of a shack with Christmas tree, East 12th Street, New York City. December 1937.
Tattered communities of the homeless coalesced in and around every major city in the country.

12. Part of the daily lineup outside the State Employment Service Office
Part of the daily lineup outside the State Employment Service Office. Memphis, Tennessee. June 1938.

13. surviving
Man in hobo jungle killing turtle to make soup, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sept Photographer: John Vachon.

14. inequality
Durham, North Carolina, May Photographer: Jack Delano. "At the bus station."

15. A "colored" water jug situated between Jim Crow bathrooms in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (1939).
The Rex Theater, a movie house in Leland, Mississippi (1939).

16. The Power of Hatred
Nazis and the KKK - Two diverse groups of people, both victims of extreme manifestations of racist oppression and persecution, albeit under vastly different historical conditions.

17. Mental Illness
Unless they had someone to care for them, people who were mentally ill were often cast aside or locked away.
Those who were deemed “unsafe” were generally put in prisons or mental hospitals for life.

18. Along the way, George and Lennie encounter several characters in this story.
Candy
Curly
Crooks
Carlson
Slim
Each character has relevance and brings something different to the story.
Pay attention to the role these characters play, and figure out what message Steinbeck was trying to express with this novella.

19. Sources Used