J.B. Bennington & Zenia Sacks DaSilva 
1930s 
The Reality and the Promise

In 2010, Hofstra University celebrated its 75th anniversary, inviting scholars to the campus to discuss the world as it was in the year Hofstra was founded. The conference "1935: The Reality and the Promise" provided a wide-ranging exploration of the 1930s with presentations, discussions, and events highlighting the arts, entertainment, society, politics, literature, and science in that momentous decade. This volume encompasses a selection of the most interesting and enlightening papers from this conference, providing both depth and breadth of coverage. By any measure, the 1930s was a pivotal decade in modern history – a time when the reality of current events and the foreshadowing of events to come tempered all promise. The tension between reality and promise is a recurrent theme in the chapters brought together here, as well as in the personalities and faces that came to define this decade.