Every semester, Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) organizes a virtual book club for graduate students and selects one or two history books to read and discuss together. Those discussions take place in the Bookmarks! group in the TPS Teachers Network, and they are not limited to MTSU students only. This fall, the two selections should be of particular interest to members of the Rural Education Group, so I'd like to invite you to acquire the books and join in! Be sure to click JOIN+ in the Bookmarks! group (if you don't already belong to it), and you can participate at any level you wish - from reading the comments to adding your own to offering up a few primary sources. I've done this several times in the past, and I always learn so much from the discussions!
Read the announcement for Fall Virtual Book Club here. The two Fall 2024 books are as follows:
- A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe
- The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan
6 - 8 9 - 12 13+ Social Studies/History Virtual Book Club Rural Education
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Edited
I highly recommend the Worst Hard Time. I appreciated reading about individual struggles. A Square Meal sounds like an intriguing title. I already downloaded it for Kindle. Growing up in the 50's and 60's I heard stories about depression era foods such as sugar and milk on bread.
Haha, Mary Alice, our Sunday night meal when I was growing up on an Iowa farm was always milk and sugar on broken up pieces of bread! I never thought of it as a hardship, but rather a break for my mother, who was happiest of all reading a book or working in her garden. To this day, by the way, my husband hates wet bread.
Mary Alice and Mary--my hardtime depression story from the 40s was that my Mom who grew up on a N.C. tobacco farm, would serve us fried bologna and pineapple for Sunday night supper. That came after having had Sunday dinner at noon, a farmer's tradition of fried chicken, fried okra, and biscuits with white gravy. It wasn't really fried bologna. Mom put the bologna slices on a cookie sheet in the oven until they curled up, then added slices of canned pineapple sprinkled with cinnamon and brown sugar. The whole concoction then went under the broiler to turn a golden crispy brown.
Believe me--it was no hardship to eat that supper.
I love bologna and ate a lot of it growing up. I am reading about salt pork in the Square Meal book. I ate a lot of that in the 50s and 60s. The depression era foods continued to be cooked by parents of us baby boomers.
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