Farm Security Administration
Agee and Evans
During the Great Depression of 1929-1939, The Farm Services Administration through federal writers and other spending programs sought to have photographers document the conditions of rural life in the country, especially among the rural poor. Walker Evans and James Agee went into the Mississippi Delta and did that very thing.
Etymological Dictionary.
The Great Depression
The United States and Imperial Japan had been at war since December 7, 1942 when the Japanese carrier-based aircraft had bombed the Naval and Army facilities of Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, then a territorial possession of the united States in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The assault was the launch of a three pronged attack on the Philippines and Hong Kong-Malaysia which the Japanese required for their war in China.
Since 1937, the Japanese had been at war with mainland China, seeking to shift the balance in the Chinese civil war between the Nationalists and the communists by hoping to restore the Manchu dynastic Emperor. Japan had signed an alliance with the Axis Powers of Germany and Italy prior to the outbreak of hostilities in Europe. The war in Europe between the United Kingdom and France on one side and the Axis Powers on the of the began in August, 1939 when Germany attacked Poland in an alleged defense of the German population living in Danzig, or the Polish corridor between two parts of Germany called East and West Prussia. Japan was an ally of Nazi Germany and the Fascist Italian state headed by Mussolini.
Background
The Second World War is considered by many knowledgeable historians to be the second phase of the Great War (1914-1918) , called World War One, because of the close relation in Europe between the Treaty ending that war and the commencement of the Second. The situation in Asia complicates this idea of a second phase of a two part greater war because Japan had changed sides in the Second World War, having initially been an ally of Britain and France in the First World War. Italy too changed sides in Europe and from 1939 to 1941 the USSR had sided with the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.
This is the context in which the scientific research into the structure of matter which eventually discovered fission and produced the atomic bomb took place. The photograph we see on this page is the immediate aftermath of the detonation of an atomic bomb that was the product of forty years of advances in physics and engineering. The bomb was also the product of a race for supremacy in science between Germany and the Anglo, French and American efforts to understand atoms and nuclear physics. In the final analysis the bomb was the explicit product of a joint military and civilian effort in the US and the UK, called the Manhattan Project to specifically build an atomic explosive device. Work on the Manhattan Project was headed by General Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer, a renowned physicist. Instigated by two Hungarian refugees, who were physicists, named Leo Szilard and Edward Teller, the manhattan project took four years, four major industrial laboratories, and two billion dollars to construct three bombs using uranium and its by-product plutonium. The explosive devices were ready in July 1945, however, three months after Germany and Italy had surrendered in Europe.
