
The Great Depression remains one of the darkest periods of American history, and pictures from that time usually reflect the experience.

They are - typically - grainy and black and white, giving a window into time defined by Hoovervilles, around the block unemployment lines, and people waiting for a piece of bread.

Now the Library of Congress has released stunning new photographs that show the period in vivid color, showcasing the strength of families, the recovery of farming and the joys of state fairs as the nation emerged from a dark time.

The photographs stretch out across the USA, with boys fishing and cotton pickers in the South to a starch factory in the East and a corn harvest in the West.

Taken from 1939 to 1941, the pictures show an America just beginning to pull itself out of a financial disaster that sent nearly 15 million Americans into unemployment by 1933.

The photos are a selection from a joint project between the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information to document American life through pictures taken between 1935 and 1944.

The US began its plunge into one of worst economic disasters of the 20th century after Wall Street plunged on October 24 1929, known as Black Thursday, precipitating the Black Tuesday crash, which sent shock waves around the nation.

The massive plunge in an overheated market was followed by a perfect storm of economic calamity, including the widespread collapse of banks, the rise of mass unemployment and huge movements of people from impoverished agricultural states in search of work.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's reform measures would eventually go some way towards getting the country back on its feet, but it was in World War II, more than a decade after the crash, that the country's economy would find full relief.

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Faro and Doris Caudill, homesteaders, on their property in Pie Town, New Mexico in October 1940. The town's name comes from a bakery that was famous for its dried apple pie

Doris passes the biscuits as her family eats dinner in their dugout in 1940. The country had come through the worst of the Depression, but the economy was still shaky

New corn is harvested in a Pie Town field in this picture taken by Russell Lee, who was working on a Farm Security Administration to show how the economic crises had hurt American farmland

Jim Norris stands in his corn field. The photos were part of the FSA's combined project with the Office of War Information to create a photographic record of American life between 1935 and 1944. Images taken from 1939 to 1941 have now been released

A Pie Town woman proudly holds up a quilt she made with a square representing each state

Tying a ribbon on a calf's tail was one of the main attractions at the Pie Town rodeo in late 1940

A horse-and-cart team pulling a car out of the mud on a road near the town, which as of 2010 now has a population of less than 200

North of New Mexico, a man hauls creates of peaches from the orchard to a shipping shed in Delta County, Colorado in 1940

Day laborers fight the sun with hats and bonnets as they pick cotton near Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1939

Four boys sit on a truck parked at an FSA labor camp. One of President Franklin D Roosevelt's reforms, these labor camps provided migratory working families with low-rent housing and free medical care

Migratory workers hang out at a 'juke joint' during a slack season in Belle Glade, Florida in early 1941

Nearly 50 trucks, some waiting for 24 hours, line up for their potatoes to be weighed and graded outside a starch factory in Caribou, Maine

People wait in line as surplus commodities are distributed in St Johns, Arizona in 1940. Pictures like these show that, even as the darkest days of the Great Depression fell behind them, many people still felt its effects until the US entered World War II after Pearl Harbor

Smokebelt: The scale of American industrial might on display in one of the pictures. It was World War II which would finally get the economy booming after the Depression

Men read headlines detailing earthquakes, obituaries and a late 'flying Santa' in Brockton, Massachusetts in 1940

Cajun children fish in a bayou near the school in Terrebonne, an FSA camp in Schriever, Louisiana in the summer of 1940

A family of girls in matching pink patterned dresses glance around the Vermont State Fair in Rutland in late 1941

A carnival barker accepts payment for a woman to see 'Teddy the Wrestling Bear' at the Vermont State Fair in early autumn 1941

Three women pose for the camera backstage at a 'girlie' show at the fair in autumn 1941. Months later, America entered the war

A parent helps lift his children out of a toy plane as it rotates along the track at the Delta County Fair in Colorado, late 1940