Prose Unit: OMaM Context

📑 JUMP TO...

1. Introduction to Of Mice and Men
2. The American Century
3. Authorial Context
4. The Death of the American Dream
5. Land of Opportunity
6. Going to California
7. Land of the Free?

Introduction to Of Mice and Men

LO: To understand the focus for this term

What are the main differences between a play and a novel?

Which has the potential to be more emotionally impactful?

Expectations this term

1. I will bring my own copy of Of Mice and Men to every lesson
2. I will have read the novel by 6th September
3. I will re-read the novel over this term
4. I will complete all allocated homework on time

Copy down these expectations, word for word

What do you want to achieve, this year?

Read. The. Book.

📖

100 pages. Two minutes per page.
20 minutes per day. Finished by next Friday.

No excuses.

What you will do on 12th May 2025

One 40-mark essay question from a choice of two on you set text - Of Mice and Men

Copy down this information

Define 'context' in this case

Going to America

What are stereotypes that people hold about Americans today? Positive and negative!

Have these changed during your lifetime?

Going to America

🎵 "The land of the free and the home of the brave." 🎶

Think about where you were born, or where your family comes from. How are Americans different from you?

The American Century

Which was the most important and why?

How to succeed

What makes someone successful? Imagine you're restarting your life...

Life in the 'Old Country'

At the time the novel was written, most Americans could trace their families back to immigrants from Europe. This included the writer himself: his family came from Germany. But why did people leave Europe to go to America?

Can you remember who these people are, and what connects them?

European immigrants arrive in New York

Engraving, 1887

Write five adjectives to describe the feelings of the people in this picture.

U$A 💸

This wave of migration - coupled with America's insulation from the devastation of the Great War - allowed the economy to outgrow Europe and the rest of the World.

American Progress, by John Gaunt (1872)

What does this picture suggest about Americans' view of themselves and their country?

The last frontier

• America had expanded from a collection of European colonies on the East coast (modern day New York, Washington, Boston etc)
• Gradually, settlers moved across the mountains, into the mid-west.
• Gold was discovered on the West coast, spurring expansion into the fertile land of what became known as California.

"There is the American Dream...

that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.
It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position...
It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.”

James Truslow Adams, 'Epic of America' (1931)

Summarise what the American Dream means

Why is it called the American Dream , not the American Way, or Philosophy, or Truth, or Plan or....

Plenary

Is the American Dream still achievable? Was it ever? What prevents it?

What would the American Dream be in 2024?

Authorial Context

Write down everything you remember about William Shakespeare

Encoding memories

• I am going to read to you about the life of the author
• You are going to take notes... without using words
• Why? Because dual-coding information makes it stick in your brain.

___________________
|  John Steinbeck |
|           👰‍♀️    |
|  👶             |
|                 |
|            🇺🇸   |
|    🖊️           |
|_________________|

Meet John Steinbeck

• Author of Of Mice and Men
• Born 1902....
• ?
• ?
• ?
• ?
• ....died 1968

Using your drawn notes, write a bullet-pointed list of all the information you can remember

Timeline of a Lifetime

LIFE:  👶       🧑‍🌾🐄           🖊️         👰‍♀️    🖊️    📖
      
      1902 -------> 1914 --------> 1929 ---------> 1937
 
 USA:    🛫      🚗  🔫 🇩🇪   💰 📈    💸 📉    💨   

Decode the symbols to work out the main events in the author's life and in the history of the USA

The Death of the
American Dream

LO: To consider the impact of the Great Depression on Of Mice and Men

Describe America's position in the world - in relation to Europe etc - in 1920. What's going well? What's changing?

Write it in the style of a letter from a recent migrant in New York, sent to their family back in the Old Country.

Recapping the American Dream

Explain the idea of the American Dream to your partner.

What's the equivalent for today?

Life in America

11th November 1918
The war is over

• The First World War had left Europe in ruins and in debt

• The USA was the only industrialised country to have survived (relatively) unharmed

• It had:
  - Lots of cash
  - Lots of workers
  - Lots of factories
  - Lots of money owed to it by the Europeans

• This meant that the American economy could grow massively in the years after the war

4th July 1920
Get rich quick

As the economy expanded, the Stock Market allowed regular Americans to share in the newly created wealth.

Individuals could buy shares: small parts of companies. When the company made money, they would get a share of the profits

As the economy grew, so did the value of these shares.

1st January 1928
things can only get better

In less than ten years, the value of these stocks more than quadrupled.

Rather than simply saving cash in banks, many regular people invested their money in shares.

It looked as though nothing could go wrong.

24th Oct 1929
The Wall Street Crash

Then, in 1929, it all went wrong.

A slowdown in house building, combined with a change in interest rates, spooked the market.

On 24th October, stock holders panicked, desperately selling their shares before prices crashed further.

In the space of one morning, $13 billion of 'value' disappeared.

26th Oct 1929
Short term panic

• As the markets crashed, people became desperate
• Those with their money in shares found them worthless
• Those with money in the banks rushed to withdraw cash
• Many banks collapsed: they didn't have enough cash on hand to serve their clients
• Banks went bust, taking their savers' money with them
• The life savings of millions of Americans were wiped out

24th Oct 1930
Long term impact

• Over the next few months, the American economy began to shrink
• Investors started keeping hold of cash, rather than putting it into businesses
• Companies couldn't afford to keep workers, or to build new factories
• Unemployment soared, with 1 in 4 Americans out of work by 1933.

Land of Opportunity

LO: To continue with our diary entries and learn about the Dustbowl

How would these events have affected the way in which Americans viewed their own country?

4th August 1931
Go West

• With factories closed and businesses bust, people were desperate for work
• Young men (without families) travelled west towards the agricultural heartlands, hoping to work on farms
• Workers would be paid low wages for hard days bringing in the harvest
• These people travelling from job to job were known as itinerant workers

10th April 1932
The Dustbowl

• Disaster struck the farms of the mid-West: The Dustbowl
• A terrible drought and over-farming dried out the topsoil of farms, and strong winds blew it away
• Fertile land became unusable, and the air became dust that slowly poisoned farming families
• Farmers went bankrupt and lost everything
• Those who could, moved further West to California

5th June 1936
On the ranch

• To try to cope with high levels of unemployment, the Government introduced Work Cards
• These cards allowed workers to take on jobs with pay subsidised by the government, encouraging farms to give work to the unemployed.
• But these cards came with conditions, and employers had incredible power over the workers
• Two such men have just left one job in California, and are on their way to the next, down in the Salinas Valley...

Going to California

LO: To consider the circumstances of itinerant workers on Californian farms in the 1930s

In four bulletpoints, explain why there were so many young men travelling to California in the 1930s

Describe what you think their outlook on life might have been

You will be taking lots of notes this lesson!

The Migrant Mother

• This photograph is one of the iconic images of the Dustbowl and the Great Depression
• It captured one of the thousands of American families making the desperate journey to California for work
• Florence Owens Thompson was a Native American mother, who travelled from farm to farm with her six children. She spent nearly a decade as an itinerant worker
• The photographer, Dorothea Lange, had been paid by the PWA to travel across America, documenting what she saw. After photographing Thompson, she never saw her again.

Hope: Roosevelt's New Deal

• In 1933, a new President was elected: Franklin D Roosevelt, usually known as FDR
• The new President poured in vast amounts of Government money, to create work for the masses of unemployed
• Two agencies - the PWA and WPA - gave jobs to skilled and unskilled workers; building homes, dams, and highways, as well as working on farms

Lower wages, higher prices

• Farm work had always been difficult, but pay had been reasonable
• Every summer, thousands of Mexican labourers would travel to California to help bring in the harvest
• But when the Great Depression began, that changed...
• Waves of internal migrants - itinerant workers - from the Eastern states flooded in to California
• With so many workers competing for limited jobs, employers could offer lower and lower salaries
• Some workers even accepted working for no pay at all, just food and lodging on the farm

No Work Card, No Work

• To try to get more Americans back into work, the government subsidised employment:
  • EMPLOYERS like farm and ranch owners would be given money to pay for every person they hired
  • WORKERS had to register with the WPA, and give their Work Cards to the employers when they started a job
• If the employers didn't like the workers, or didn't like their work quality, they could fire them and withhold the workers' Work Cards
• ... no Work Card? No Job

Who had more power in this arrangement? Employers or workers?

🎩 Bourgeoises Vs Proletariat 🔧

Use these words to describe the situation on Californian ranches in the 1930s

Land of the Free?

LO: To understand the structure and importance of segregation in American society in the 1930s

The New York Times recently launched a project encouraging teachers to start their history courses from this date. Why?

From bad to worse

• The Great Depression hit everyone, though some more than others
• African-Americans were twice as likely to lose their jobs, compared to white Americans
• At the height of the Depression, more African-Americans were out of work than employed
• Why?

Back to 1865

• The American Civil War freed four million slaves
• They were now American citizens, just like their white masters
• The Northern states could celebrate this, but in the South many still resisted the change
• Over the next one hundred years, state governments across America - supported by white votes - would bring in laws and rules that prevented African-Americans from being treated as the equal citizens they were
• This process was known as Segregation

Segregation ~~> SEGREGATUS - (Latin) to separate or take apart a group

'The Jim Crow Laws'

• Segregation was about keeping whites and non-white Americans apart.
• This affected every aspect of society:
  • Schools would only have children of one colour
  • Estate agents were allowed to exclude black residents
  • Buildings had different entrances for blacks and whites
  • And employers could refuse to hire workers on the grounds of race
• So when money was tight, which employees got let go first?

Fighting for rights

• California had very relatively few written segregating whites and non-whites - it was far better than the Southern states.
• But that didn't mean the people were more welcoming...

Mallie Robinson and her five children came to California in search of something better, only to find more of the same. When the Robinsons relocated from Georgia to Pasadena in 1922, their white neighbors greeted them with a flaming cross on their front lawn.

Kevin Waite, 'Black California'

Life in California

• Although the law in California didn't force segregation, it also did little to enforce equality
• African-Americans could still expect:
  • Lower pay
  • Worse conditions
  • Poor housing
  • Unfair treatment by police
• This last point was the most dangerous: lynching was always a risk
• If accused of something, African-Americans could be kidnapped and murdered by mobs of white men. The law would turn a blind eye.

Life on the ranch

• Our novel is set on one ranch, in one valley of one state
• But the author tries to use it to tell a story about the whole of America at the time
• The word to use for this technique is...

Microcosm

(noun) A place or situation that represents in miniature form the characteristics of something much larger.

PLENARY: Quiz Recap

What's in a name?

“But Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid plans of mice and men
Often go awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy”

Robert Burns, 'To A Mouse'