Kenneth J. Bindas examines the lives of rural Georgians and others in his new collection of more than 600 oral histories, *Remembering the Great Depression in the Rural South*. Bindas provides a detailed, personal chronicle of the 1930's from a rural Southern perspective and captures an important historical era and its impact. These reminiscences were collected over a four-year period in the late 1980's as people looked back over their lives and those of their families.
Being born and raised into a working-class family in Youngstown, Ohio, and witness to the steel era decline in the seventies and eighties encouraged Kenneth J. Bindas to study the negotiation of power between government, business and the people. Using culture (political, social, and popular) as the lens to view primarily the Depression era, his research and teaching has focused on how the people redefined themselves, their government, and business in this era of swirling change. Bindas' current research intersects the construction of memory and society: on one hand he is working on Oral history methodology and its role in the construction of history (both personal and social); and on the other, researching the multivariate means by which modernity became not just a term to help define the Depression era, but signaled a change of consciousness, a secular reformation.