Eleanor Roosevelt could be called a Superstar First Lady. In the era when women's suffrage was first being exercised, she was "pushing the envelope" of what the President's wife, and women in general, might be expected to do in civic life. She wrote syndicated columns for magazines and newspapers, the most famous of which was entitled "My Day," a daily column that continued from 1936 until shortly before her death in 1962. Mrs. Roosevelt had a successful career as a radio broadcaster, talking not only about home and family, as might be expected of a female public figure, but also commenting on the news. She used these forums to promote the New Deal, the great economic and social policy reforms of her husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Eleanor received an estimated 300,000 letters in 1933. Year after year, the flood of correspondence continued. Many of the letters to Eleanor were written by young people. The hand-written letters, collected over the years of the Roosevelt administration, are archived at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, where they are available to students of history. In the cooperative learning activity described in this article, the author shares photocopies of several hand-written letters obtained from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum to teach students about the Great Depression. Five handouts, which are excerpts of letters, follow. This one-hour classroom lesson helps give a personal meaning to the statistics and textbook descriptions. Students enjoy reading and analyzing a letter by someone close to their own age. Students are asked to read a letter carefully and then categorize the concerns of the young person who is writing. The lesson is described in this article.