We've previously blogged about The People's History, a website dedicated to history as remembered by ordinary people.
Here's a video of Ed Kinowski from Amsterdam, NY, reminiscing about what it was like to grow up in the years of the Great Depression.
We lived in a poor section of Amsterdam New York and for Christmas my mother gave me a little red wagon, I knew that we were poor so I just made it a point to go into the city and to go into the back yards of furniture stores and so forth to pick up these boxes for heating and I remember one day I was near a police station and the policeman took my hand and I thought he was going to arrest me for taking these boxes and instead he put a bushel of food into my wagon and I thought that was pretty good so we had some food.
http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/2007/04/edd-video-memory.html [Google Video] - Thanks Steve Pearson!