{"id":34,"date":"2020-11-13T19:18:28","date_gmt":"2020-11-13T19:18:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/reboot\/?page_id=34"},"modified":"2020-12-11T18:43:24","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T18:43:24","slug":"overview-significance","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/reboot\/overview-significance\/","title":{"rendered":"Overview & Significance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Overview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What America Ate<\/a> <\/em>is an online, interactive project about food during the Great Depression. It is based off of America Eats<\/a>; <\/em>a jobs project during the Depression. This project is set up as a faceted browser allowing people to easily explore through the content of the site. The main facets are America eats<\/a>, advertising<\/a>, community cookbooks<\/a>, recipes<\/a>, photography<\/a>, and help make history<\/a>. The projects goal is to provide those preciously stated facets with other material to help create a better understanding of the 1930’s to early 40’s. Leaders of the project are Helen Zoe Veit<\/a>, Peter Berg <\/a>and Dean Rehberger<\/a> of Michigan state University among an extensive list of others as seen at the bottom of What America Eats’ <\/em>about page<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Significance <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The goal of this project is quite casual; it is to provide a space where people can explore through archives from America Eats. The project shows how the writers who worked on America Eats would lean towards showing off the rarest and most rustic styles of eating, which defeats the whole purpose of what the project was about. In a way the project turns users into amateur historians uncovering the truth of the time period snd being able to differentiate between interesting recipes writers thought to include and actual eating styles. The website never clearly states what the goal is, but by reading through an educated guess can be made from text hinting at what it is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Project Details<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

America Eats<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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America Eats was jobs project created during the Great Depression. It required writers to go to every state to record how America was eating. During these times people were lacking money and food nutrition was beginning to become a more prominent thing. How America ate was beginning to change so the government started the project. The goal of the project was to make it into a “coffee-table book” not a cookbook, but not all of the writers had a complete grasp on that concept. Instead of sending in the requested essays many people would send in transcribed recipes instead; this lead to the wide range of resources What America Ate now has. During the fall and winter of 1941-42 while the projects was in the works there were many other elements fo American culture that were arising. World War II was going on at this point in history and that lead to the project taking a bit of a turn. Many writers began to turn the project into a way to amp up patriotism. While looking through the archives many things are prominent but one that stands out is racism. This project, while it may not be the main focus, is a great reminder of the discrimination the black community experienced during these times. Along with that there are many other warps concepts brought to the attention of viewers such as sexism and ethnocentrism. After all of the collected work and materials that were gathered after the project was coming to a conclusion the project was never published. Instead it was shipped off to the Library of Congress (where it still remains) and scattered about through history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Advertising<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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The advertisements are a good way to not only see the newest things in cooking for the time, but also helps to understand the mindset and norms of people during this era. The advertisements are stylish and colorful artworks keeping up with the style of the time period. Taking a more in depth look the advertisements show views that are now seen as atrocious. Whenever there is a person cooking on shown it is always a women. In these times a woman’s job was in the kitchen and focused around taking care of the household in domestic ways. One of the advertisements is “Cooking for a Man: Tested Recipes to Please Him!”<\/a> The image of this advertisement is a woman with a chefs hat on and cooking materials in hand while a headshot of a man is looking down on her and smiling. Inside there is a line that says “Don’t you dress, make-up and hair-do to please a man? Cook with the same idea in mind…” Everything from what their wearing to the positioning of the people shows how prominent sexism was in American culture during the Great Depression. Even coupons were directed towards the sexist views that a woman’s job is to take care of children and keep everyone fed. “It Pays You Two Ways: Here’s a Special Invitation to Start”<\/a> is an advertisement for coupons. The two ways are “Valuable coupons give you grand premiums!” and “Rich goodness for baby and you!” the cover of this ad is a woman with her young daughter and inside is a picture of a woman holding a baby. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Community Cookbooks<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Community cookbooks are one of the best ways to see what America was eating during the Great Depression. They show the way communities were together, fundraised and technological advances in cooking that were coming up at the time. The handwritten cookbooks are primarily all written by women. In the end of “Pantry Shelf Trails: A Collection of Recipes Contributed by the Members and Friends of the Ladies if Mount Vernon, New York.”<\/a> there is a short story between “Housewife” and a woman named Grace titles “She Found Joy in the Kitchen”<\/a>. The housewife is “inspiring” Grace on the wonders of working in the kitchen. They introduce kitchen modernization with the new gas range oven, automatic refrigerator and small electric appliances. For the most part the sections of the community cookbooks are the same. The chapters include bread, meat, soups, salads, sandwiches and desserts. For the most part the recipes are all fairly simple and inexpensive to make, which matches up with what people were going through during the period of time they were written. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recipes <\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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The Great Depression was the worst time for the economy in history. Many people were without jobs and money was scarce. This was no time for fancy cooking with unusual ingredients. Looking through the recipes exemplifies how people were living and making do while in this severe financial drought. For the most part the recipes contain a small number of ingredient. For all of the recipes the ingredients used are inexpensive items one could find at any grocery store. People could not afford lavish lifestyles, but even without the ability to obtain expensive ingredients they still were able to create amazing recipes. Writers attempted to include recipes that include ingredients that did not truly represent what Americans were eating as a whole, which threw off the project. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photography<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

There is no better way to fully understand something than being able to see it with your own eyes. The pictures best tell the story of how drastically different white people and people of color were treated and experienced the depression. Every one was effected by the depression, but people of color were already being oppressed and paid less than white people. Due to already being at a much lower starting point it made the duration of the Depression and the recovery after much harder. To this day black family’s are still suffering financially and otherwise from the oppression white people forced their ancestors to endure throughout history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Playing Horseshoes at the Peanut Festival.”<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the two pictures above you can see the difference. In the top picture you see white families playing horseshoes at a festival. In the picture below theres a small cabin with a makeshift stove and some pans. This stove was used to feed a camp of 35 migrant workers. Even all the way down to how people ate can show how warped the societal views during the 1930’s were. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Stove outside cabin used by migrant workers near Old Trap, North Carolina.”<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Help Make History<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

This section of the project is not a part of the archives, but it is still an important element of the project. Help make history gives those who are interested in the project an opportunity to become involved in it. By signing up to transcribe recipes from old cookbooks you become a part of What America Ate. <\/em>Finding common themes and key ingredients gives participants the opportunity to earn badges. This part of the project is currently down. The project is not currently allowing people to use this function.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Other<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The website provides more information that just the archive components. Explore History<\/a> allows people to read works related to the project such as “Domestic Workers in the South” by Rebecca Sharpless<\/a>. Spotlight Sources<\/a> gives a more in depth look on key concept of the project to better understand the language and reasoning of their importance. Things such as breakfast<\/a> and immigrants<\/a> are spotlighted. Some of the topics in this section are not completed and are said to be coming soon. There is also an interactive map<\/a> that people to search archives by state or region. During the original America Eats project administrators divided the country into five regions: the Northeast, the South, the Middle West, the Far West, and the Southwest. This allowed the writers to to speak on not only the country’s culture as a whole, but also culture regionally. This page of the website makes sure to remind users that generalizing by region is never 100% as people are constantly moving across borders and by nature the way people eat always changes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When and Who<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

It is unclear when the project started and if it is ended or not. The website does not provide any information on the timing of the project. Although sections of the website that say “coming soon” it can be assumed the project has ended. The Help Make History facet is not currently allowing people to login or create an account in order to contribute to the project. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The project team is made up of four smaller teams: principal investigators, project management team, advisory board members, and the technical team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Overview What America Ate is an online, interactive project about food during the Great Depression. It is based off of America Eats; a jobs project during the Depression. This project is set up as a faceted browser allowing people to easily explore through the content of the site. The main […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-34","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/reboot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/reboot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/reboot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/reboot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/reboot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/reboot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":252,"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/reboot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34\/revisions\/252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/classprojects.digitalwcu.org\/reboot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}