Farm Security Administration Photographs

This playlist of photographs—taken from the New York Public Library archives—documents life during America’s Great Depression. It was a time when the agricultural atmosphere and national financial instability were causing large disturbances in rural life across the country. The Farm Security Administration was implemented in 1935 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal—it was, in essence, an effort to alleviate American rural poverty. These images portray the struggles and hardships, but also the beauty and triumphs, of America’s rural people.