MSI Press Blog

  Sharon Cole's book, Hazel and Olaf   reached #4 among hot new releases in the category of Great Depression and #24 in depression history (Amazon general category). Book Description: They sold the farm, packed up seven children, and chased a promise called California. Based on Hazel’s journal, this true story follows a family that leaves Wisconsin hoping for relief from brutal winters—only to run out of money with hundreds of miles still to go. Stranded and desperate, they enter a world of labor camps, endless fieldwork, hunger, and exhaustion, where families are worked hard, paid little, and treated as disposable. Once respected and secure, they find themselves suddenly labeled vagrants. Pride becomes a liability. Dignity must be defended daily. And survival depends on grit, faith, and refusing to give up—especially for Hazel, who will not allow poverty to erase who she is or break her family apart. This is a raw, gripping true story of endurance, injustice, and a woman who ...

  Sharon Cole's book, Hazel and Olaf , recently reached #25 in the Amazon category, depression history in the US, and #4 among hot new releases in the category, Great Depression. Book Description: They sold the farm, packed up seven children, and chased a promise called California. Based on Hazel’s journal, this true story follows a family that leaves Wisconsin hoping for relief from brutal winters—only to run out of money with hundreds of miles still to go. Stranded and desperate, they enter a world of labor camps, endless fieldwork, hunger, and exhaustion, where families are worked hard, paid little, and treated as disposable. Once respected and secure, they find themselves suddenly labeled vagrants. Pride becomes a liability. Dignity must be defended daily. And survival depends on grit, faith, and refusing to give up—especially for Hazel, who will not allow poverty to erase who she is or break her family apart. This is a raw, gripping true story of endurance, injustice, and a wo...

  Field work in the Depression was not just a job; it was survival. Families followed the harvests like tides — cotton in Texas, beans in California, fruit in the San Joaquin Valley. They lived by the rhythm of crops and weather, moving from one promise of wages to the next. The work was hard, the pay meager, and the dignity fragile. The Family as Workforce Children worked beside their parents, not out of choice but necessity. A ten‑year‑old could pick cotton, sort beans, or carry water. A mother might cook for twenty workers in a camp kitchen, then join the line in the fields. Fathers negotiated with foremen for pennies per pound. Everyone labored; everyone contributed. Childhood was brief, replaced by endurance. The Camps and the Dust Families lived in makeshift camps — tents, shacks, or cars turned into homes. Dust settled on everything: food, bedding, skin. Privacy was a luxury, and sanitation often nonexistent. Yet within that hardship, families built small worlds of care — sh...

During the Great Depression, education for children in migrant labor camps was as fragile as the tents they slept in. Families moved constantly, chasing harvests across California’s valleys and plains. Schools were fixed places; these children were not. Yet, somehow, learning still found them. In the early years, most migrant children had no formal schooling at all. They worked beside their parents in the fields, picking cotton, beans, or fruit from dawn until dusk. But as the crisis deepened, reformers and teachers began to see that ignorance was another kind of poverty — one that could last generations. The federal government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) stepped in, building makeshift schools near camps and hiring teachers willing to teach under canvas roofs or in converted barracks. Lessons were often improvised. A single teacher might teach reading, arithmetic, and hygiene to forty children of mixed ages. Supplies were scarce — chalkb...

  In the migrant camps of Depression‑era California, mothers held their families together with a kind of quiet, stubborn genius. The government reports of the time barely mention them, and the photographs—Dorothea Lange’s especially—catch only a fraction of what they carried. But if you look closely, you see the architecture of survival was maternal. They created order in disorder. In camps where dust blew through every seam and nothing stayed put, mothers established routines: morning washing, evening meals, a predictable rhythm that told children, We are still a family, even here. Sociologists later noted that these small rituals stabilized children more effectively than any federal intervention. They built community out of strangers. Women shared food, sewing needles, childcare, and news. They traded recipes that stretched beans into meals and turned bruised fruit into something sweet. They formed informal cooperatives—one woman mended clothes, another watched toddlers, another...