( Hint: Things were much more complex than we're usually told.) And by including the perspectives of so many different people, Terkel is able to paint a richer picture of what things were like. It's one thing to read about the Great Depression in textbooks, or to hear it used as leverage in political speeches, but it's another thing entirely to read the experiences of the people who lived through it. Terkel spoke with all sorts of people: old and young, rich and poor, famous and not-so-famous, liberal and conservative. In 1970, writer Studs Terkel published Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, which features excerpts from over 100 interviews he conducted with those who lived through the 1930s. I don't know anyone who lived through the Great Depression, so to find out what it might have been like, I turned to a book recommended by a couple of GRS readers. In my lifetime, the closest I've come to experiencing anything like the Depression was during the recession of the early 1980s, which was hard on my family. They smack of hyperbole, but I can't be sure. Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't, but even if it were, what would it mean? I have no frame of reference for these sorts of claims. We've heard a lot of rhetoric lately about how this is the worst economy since the Great Depression.
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