What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times, out from Beacon Press in 2024, explores the ways in which ordinary working people, in the face of economic crisis and ferocious racism, turned to collective action from below during the Great Depression. It’s structured as a series of four long essays: One explores mutual aid and mass protests demanding relief. Another looks at the forced repatriation of a million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and the activism that accompanied it, contrasting its erasure from US history with the enshrinement of the plight of white “Dust Bowl Migrants.” A third tells the story of a sit-down strike by seven African American women who worked as wet nurses for the city of Chicago, and the powers that underlay their audacious militance. The final piece explores a powerful network of white supremacist fascists in the Upper Midwest, known as the Black Legion. With both inspiring and sobering stories, the book is designed to speak directly to working people’s challenges today while offering a nuanced understanding of the race and gender politics of what each group did and didn’t get from the New Deal.