Dust Bowl Migration Archives at Sonoma State University
This collection was developed and donated by Sonoma State University professor emeritus Gerald Haslam, documents the migration of dust bowl farm workers to California in the 1930s and 1940s. The project archives hold correspondence, stories, music, newsletters, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, photographs and camp diaries.
Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information Collections
Images depicting the Great Depression created by U.S. government photographers.
Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection
Online presentation of an ethnographic field collection documenting the everyday life of residents of migrant work camps in Central California in 1940 and 1941.
Fact or Fiction: Looking at the Migrant Labor Experience in 1930s California
This exhibit looks at the ways migrant laborers, specifically those camped in California, were portrayed in the 1930s. All of the photographs, with the exception of the John Steinbeck portrait, were taken by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange began her professional photographer career during the years of the Great Depression in San Francisco. She became fascinated with the plight of the poor whose lives had been turned upside down by the stock market crash. She was hired for her unparalleled skill of capturing the emotional experiences of her subjects. Dorothea began working for the FSA under the supervision of Paul Taylor, who would later become her husband in 1935. Taylor, a scholar from the University of California, Berkeley, along with Lange would write and publish reports on the conditions of migrant laborers across the United States, but, specifically, Kern County. Later they would publish American Exodus, a book of the same topic. It is this work that helped secure funding for sanitary camps for laborers.