Crafting Sanctuaries: Definitions of Key Concepts

This glossary provides definitions and historical context helpful in understanding the United States during the Great Depression and the New Deal era. From the economic collapse of the 1930s and the government’s sweeping efforts at recovery, to the deeply rooted systems of labor and racial inequality that shaped American life, each term below includes citation.

The Great Depression

From 1929-1939, the United States experienced a historic economic crisis known as the Great Depression.

In the years following World War I (1914-1919), the country’s economy was particularly strong, leading many Americans to invest their savings in the stock market, take out larger loans, and expand businesses. Banks, too, invested large sums in stocks, sometimes borrowing from customer accounts to do so. In October 1929, the stock market crashed, and the value of those investments plummeted.

Any person or business who had invested in the stock market before the crash lost most of their money. Suddenly, unprecedented numbers of Americans went into debt. With the economy declining, businesses cut jobs to save money. As a result, by 1933, one in four Americans were unemployed, and those who managed to keep their jobs had their wages cut. Many people lost their homes due to foreclosures.

Farmers were hit especially hard during this crisis; forty-five percent of American farms faced foreclosure by 1933. Crop prices fell to record lows, and severe drought and dust storms that swept the Midwest in the 1930s destroyed fields and farms, leaving at least 500,000 Americans houseless.

Source: Romer, C.D., and R.H. Pells. "Great Depression." Encyclopedia Britannica, March 26, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Depression.

The New Deal

The New Deal refers to a series of government programs, banking reform laws, and public projects put in place by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt between 1933-1938 to alleviate the impacts of the Great Depression.

The Works Progress Administration was one such program, which provided jobs to millions of people in service of public projects, such as building roads and hospitals or painting murals. The Farm Security Administration was one aspect of Roosevelt’s New Deal, and it is the reason we have access to so many photographs of farmers during the Great Depression. Another example is the Social Security Act, which continues today as an insurance network that provides financial support to retired workers, people with disabilities, families facing financial hardship, and public health projects.

Source: The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. "New Deal." Encyclopedia Britannica, March 29, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/event/New-Deal.

Farm Security Administration

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal program that started in 1937. The FSA sought to address the needs of the country’s rural farmers, who were hit especially hard by the Great Depression.

Under the FSA, the government relocated impoverished farmers to new land, offered emergency relief and loaned money to farmers, and built experimental rural communities for migrant farmworkers.

The project was highly controversial in the government, as many politicians believed the government was becoming too involved in the lives of citizens. To emphasize the importance and need for the FSA, the head of the administration’s historical division, Roy Stryker, paid photographers to travel to document the lives of America’s rural farmers and the impact of the FSA on their lives. The hope was that these photos would show urban Americans what farmworkers were experiencing and help justify the FSA’s existence.

Source: Gabbert, Jim. “Farm Security Administration.” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=FA015.

Sharecropping

Sharecropping is a system in which people farm on land they do not own and are compensated for their labor not in wages but with a portion—or ‘share’—of the harvest. Sharecropping in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries operated as a form of economic slavery, in which workers did not have the ability to leave their farming positions due to the way the system strategically indebted them to their landlords.

The sharecropping system in the US formed shortly after the end of the Civil War. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, formerly enslaved Black Americans were tasked with starting independent lives without any money or property to their name. Many Black Americans had nowhere to live and often no job prospects due to racial prejudice. For many, sharecropping was the only option. The arrangement created an oppressive system in which sharecroppers, being paid no money for their labor, did not have the economic mobility to leave or pursue other opportunities and instead continued laboring on land they did not own.

Further, sharecroppers would often borrow money from their landlords to buy tools to work on the land, thus racking up debt that their share of the harvest rarely could pay off. In the US, sharecroppers were tied to their employers by poverty and debt, effectively extending the conditions of slavery without legal protection.

Source: The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. "sharecropping." Encyclopedia Britannica, March 14, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/topic/sharecropping.

Tenant Farming

Tenant farming is another arrangement where people farm and cultivate land they do not own but rather rent.

Whereas sharecroppers rented the tools, seeds, and land, tenant farmers owned their own tools and only rented the land they worked on, which they paid for in cash. Tenant farmers generally had more independence and financial means than sharecroppers.

Source: The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. "tenant farming." Encyclopedia Britannica, February 1, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/topic/tenant-farming.

Jim Crow South

Jim Crow refers to a period from the end of the Reconstruction in the 1870s to the middle of the 20th century, characterized by extreme racial prejudice and violence toward Black people in the Southern United States. Jim Crow gave rise to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, during which legal victories gradually overturned many Jim Crow laws. Some of those landmark legal milestones included the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, which declared discrimination in public schools unconstitutional; the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, gender, and nationality; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the 1967 case Loving v. Virginia, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws.

Following the end of the Civil War, a brief period known as Reconstruction saw the federal government attempt to redress the injustices of slavery, including granting citizenship to all people born in the US and making it illegal for states to deny voting rights based on race. The Freedmen’s Bureau played a significant role in these efforts. Created in 1865, this federal agency worked to assist formerly enslaved Black people in Southern states by establishing schools; providing medical care, shelter, and employment assistance; and attempting to redistribute land (e.g. “40 acres and a mule”). The Freedmen’s Bureau operated until 1872. After federal troops left the South in 1877, Southern states rapidly passed laws that tried to undo the reforms of the Reconstruction era. These laws are known as Jim Crow laws, and they enforced racial segregation, allowed for unequal payment based on race, blocked voting rights, and even encouraged vigilante hate crimes. White supremacist militant groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), terrorized Black Americans and lead campaigns of racial violence with no legal ramifications.

Sources: Urofsky, M.I. "Jim Crow law." Encyclopedia Britannica, February 14, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/event/Jim-Crow-law.

Pilgrim, David Dr. “What Was Jim Crow?” Jim Crow Museum, 2012. https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/what.htm.

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