Keeping the past under your hat

There is no better place to get a monumental snapshot of America in the Depression-World War II years than on the Library of Congress Website. This photo, simply titled “East Texan,” was taken in Jacksonville, Texas, in October 1939 by renown photographer Russell Lee as part of the Depression-era federally-funded Farm Security Administration documentation project. If you can’t see the worth in this federal program through works of art such as these, then you probably just have no real appreciation for history. Lee would later become a professor of photography at the University of  Texas in Austin.