Proposal

Proposal

The final project of this semester for my English 1050 class is a research paper. The group that I am a part of has decided to study about the life of the people who lived in New York during the Great Depression. The fictitious person that I decided to create to study this time was an Italian Immigrant whose name is Danny Pozutto. He is about twenty years old with brown hair, dark brown eyes, and can barely speak any English. He came with his mother and father, hoping to find success in the booming stock market of America in the 1920’s. Sadly his hopes went down hill when the markets crashed and plunged the country into the depression. Accompanying him was his father, mother, and younger sister who was still in school.
The things that I already know about the Great Depression were that it began in 1929 when the stock markets crashed. It affected almost everyone and things began to worsen when the dust bowl began, where many crops failed because of over farming. When all of this was mixed together it caused people to conserve their food by canning and cutting back. Also many jobs were put into place so that people could make money, some of which were laying brick roads. The thing that I already knew about the immigrants was that at the same time there was prohibition until 1933. Some immigrants made money by bootlegging and selling to the Mafia. Others joined together in small towns, living together to survive. Other than that I don’t know a whole lot about the subject and how it affected Italian immigrants specifically.
Things that I would like to learn is how it impacted Italian immigrants that stayed in New York. I want to know why they stayed in New York, how they lived, what they did on an every day basis, and what the government may have done to help them. I also want to know how it may have affected their culture and how they adapted to this way of life. These are some of the questions that I would like to have answered through this project.