Interactive, county-level map shows Depression-era photos taken throughout the U.S

An interactive web-based county-level map created by team from Yale University allows users to view Depression-era photos taken in each available county by federally paid photographers. (A man uses enormous asbestos mittens to handle hot magnesium ingots at Basic Magnesium’s plant in the southern Nevada desert in 1943.)

"The initiative was a public-relations move to bolster support for programs under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s contentious Farm Security Administration, which sought to help those hardest hit by the Great Depression," Sarah Tory reports for High Country News. "When it was over, some 175,000 photographs were transferred to the Library of Congress and eventually placed online, but they remained hard for the wider public to access." To view the map click here.