Download Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression AudioBook Free
At the elevation of the Great Major depression, 250,000 young adults were roaming America. Some kept home because they believed they were an encumbrance to their people; some fled homes shattered by the shame of unemployment and poverty; some kept because it felt a great excitement. Whether with the blessings of parents or as runaways, they struck the street and went searching for a much better life. By summer season 1932, the "roving boy" had become a fixture on the American surroundings. The occasional female was sighted, too, most passing unrecognized in male garb. Young ladies especially did not make the decision to hit the street lightly, for these were stepping into a global filled with risk. It was the same for young African-Americans, for whom the beckoning rails could be doubly perilous. Among the vital, neglected sagas of America in the 1930s, the story of the boxcar boys and girls has hardly ever been informed. Riding the Rails draws primarily on words and dental histories of 3,000 women and men who hopped freight trains, their extraordinary journeys an remarkable and moving history. We see the decade of the Great Depression completely through the sight of young people surviving a surroundings of damage, growing up fast in speeding boxcars, residing in hobo jungles, begging on the roads and jogging from the authorities and club-wielding railroad guards. Riding the rails was a rite of passage for a technology of young Us citizens which profoundly formed their lives. Self-reliance, compassion, frugality, and a love of independence and country are in the heart of the lessons these they discovered. Their recollections are an assortment of nostalgia and pain; their later musings still tinged with worries of heading broke again. At journey's end, the resiliency of the survivors is a testament to the indomitable durability of the real human spirit. Additionally it is an inspiration to all who promote a nostalgia for the street and the freedoms desired there.
