This week, a lecture about the New Deal community of Norvelde, located in southwestern Pennsylvania.

With 250 homes, Norveld provided housing, work, and a community environment to unemployed workers and their families during the Great Depression.

It was renamed Norveld in 1937 in honor of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt

and her interest in the project. One of the goals was to allow stranded industrial workers,

people who were doing mining, not farming, out away from the cities, to stay in the hinterland

because the only places at this point that were really helping providing unemployment

relief and food were the city. So you would go to the city, the city would try and feed

folks who were unemployed within the city and who were struggling. We didn't have a national

program yet. We didn't have statewide programs. More with St. Vincent College Professor

Timothy Kelly in a moment.

Today's reading would have been on the Great Depression. Families face the Great Depression,

so it would be appropriate for us to talk about the story of Norveld, which is a Great Depression story,

about how to deal with the suffering that the Great Depression brought about.

And I want to first talk a little bit about that suffering.

So we can see that economic opportunity fell pretty dramatically. This is a measure of U.S.

gross domestic product. So does anybody know what that might mean? Gross domestic product.

Have a sense? Dan? That would be products in the U.S. in general, not imports or exports,

just products in the U.S.? And not just physical products, but all economic activity. So it's an

attempt to measure all the economic activity that's happening in the economy. And so, and of course,

it won't catch everything, but it catches a lot of it,

and it's good to compare across time. And you can see that in 1929, we're over $100 billion in

gross domestic product, but that started to fall pretty dramatically, so that by 1930, we're below

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