HIstorical+Significance

=Great Depression and To Kill a Mockingbird =

Harper Lee sets her novel in, Southern United States in the 1930's, in the heart of the Great depression. Lee applies the many effects of the Great Depression to her novel in which: poverty is an epidemic, unemployment is at a high, and people look for anyone or anything to give the slightest sign of hope.

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= Racial injustice and //To Kill a Mockingbird// =

Harper Lee alludes to the trial of the Scottsboro Boys in her own Tom Robinson Trial. Within the trial of Tom Robinson, Lee highlights the racial injustic which is running rampant in the time of the novel. In the 1930's a poor white man, was more respected than a "well-to- do" black man. Despite the efforts of Reconstruciton in the 1865-1877, black men and women, in the minds of the social majority, were inferior to white men and women. Atticus Finch summarizes societal stereotypes of black men in his closing arguments: "The witnesses for the State, with the exception of the sheriff of Lincoln County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen -- to this Court -- in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted; confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption, the evil assumption, that all negroes lie; all negroes are basically immoral beings; all negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption that one associates with minds of their caliber, and which is in itself, gentlemen, a lie -- which I do not need to point out to you." -Atticus Finch //To Kill a Mockingbird//

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Helpful Links: [|The Great Depression]

[|Jim Crow Laws] [|The Scottsboro Trial]