Author: Christine Bold
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578061952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Get Book Here
Book Description
In 1935 the FDR administration put 40,000 unemployed artists to work in four federal arts projects. The main contribution of one unit, the Federal Writers Project, was the American Guide Series, a collectively composed set of guidebooks to every state, most regions, and many cities, towns, and villages across the United States. The WPA arts projects were poised on the cusp of the modern bureaucratization of culture. They occurred at a moment when the federal government was extending its reach into citizens' daily lives. The 400 guidebooks the teams produced have been widely celebrated as icons of American democracy and diversity. Clumped together, they manifest a lofty role for the project and a heavy responsibility for its teams of writers. The guides assumed the authority of conceptualizing the national identity. In The WPA Guides: Mapping America Christine Bold closely examines this publicized view of the guides and reveals its flaws. Her research in archival materials reveals the negotiations and conflicts between the central editors in Washington and the local people in the states. Race, region, and gender are taken as important categories within which difference and conflict appear. She looks at the guidebook for each of five distinctively different locations -- Idaho, New York City, North Carolina, Missouri, and U.S. One and the Oregon Trail--to assess the editorial plotting of such issues as gender, race, ethnicity, and class. As regionalists jostled with federal officialdom, the faultlines of the project gaped open. Spotlighting the controversies between federal and state bureaucracies, Bold concludes that the image of America that the WPA fostered is closer to fabrication than to actuality. Christine Bold is director of the Centre for Cultural Studies and an associate professor of English at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario.
Author: Federal Writers' Project
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American guide series
Languages : en
Pages : 44
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Wendy Griswold
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022635797X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the midst of the Great Depression, Americans were nearly universally literate—and they were hungry for the written word. Magazines, novels, and newspapers littered the floors of parlors and tenements alike. With an eye to this market and as a response to devastating unemployment, Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration created the Federal Writers’ Project. The Project’s mission was simple: jobs. But, as Wendy Griswold shows in the lively and persuasive American Guides, the Project had a profound—and unintended—cultural impact that went far beyond the writers’ paychecks. Griswold’s subject here is the Project’s American Guides, an impressively produced series that set out not only to direct travelers on which routes to take and what to see throughout the country, but also to celebrate the distinctive characteristics of each individual state. Griswold finds that the series unintentionally diversified American literary culture’s cast of characters—promoting women, minority, and rural writers—while it also institutionalized the innovative idea that American culture comes in state-shaped boxes. Griswold’s story alters our customary ideas about cultural change as a gradual process, revealing how diversity is often the result of politically strategic decisions and bureaucratic logic, as well as of the conflicts between snobbish metropolitan intellectuals and stubborn locals. American Guides reveals the significance of cultural federalism and the indelible impact that the Federal Writers’ Project continues to have on the American literary landscape.
Author: Nick Taylor
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0553381326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 673
Get Book Here
Book Description
Seventy-five years after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, here for the first time is the remarkable story of one of its enduring cornerstones, the Works Progress Administration (WPA): its passionate believers, its furious critics, and its amazing accomplishments. The WPA is American history that could not be more current, from providing economic stimulus to renewing a broken infrastructure. Introduced in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression, when unemployment and desperation ruled the land, this controversial nationwide jobs program would forever change the physical landscape and social policies of the United States. The WPA lasted eight years, spent $11 billion, employed 8½ million men and women, and gave the country not only a renewed spirit but a fresh face. Now this fascinating and informative book chronicles the WPA from its tumultuous beginnings to its lasting presence, and gives us cues for future action.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 726
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Herman Francis Reinhart
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477301887
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398
Get Book Here
Book Description
The gold rush was Herman Francis Reinhart's life for almost twenty years. From the summer of 1851 when, as a boy in his late teens, he traveled the Oregon trail to California, until a January day in 1869 when he climbed aboard an eastbound train at Evanston, Wyoming, he was a part of every gold discovery that stirred the West. Reinhart dipped his pan in the streams of northern California and western Oregon—in Humbug Creek, Indian Creek, Rogue River, and Sucker Creek. He made the arduous and dangerous overland journey through Indian-occupied western Washington and British Columbia to find the Fraser River gold even more elusive than that farther south. With his teams and wagons he traversed all of the inland mine areas from Walla Walla to Fort Benton, from Boise Basin to South Pass City. Reinhart's German common sense soon turned him from actual mining to other sources of income, but whatever his labor was, the mines were always the focal point of his activities. When he operated a bakery and saloon it was a business whose customers were miners, whose transactions were more likely to involve gold dust than legal tender, and whose gambling tables saw the exchange of mining fortunes. When he operated a whipsaw mill the timbers cut there were used by miners for sluices and cradles. For a while Reinhart farmed, but planting and harvesting suffered from interruption by frequent expeditions to the mines. And when he prospered as a teamster it was to and from the mining towns that he hauled passengers, supplies, and equipment. The men who, like Herman Francis Reinhart, hopefully followed the golden frontier were not an articulate group, and the written records of their lives are few and fragmentary. But Reinhart, in his later years, recorded his experiences in five long, narrow, hardback ledgers. Many years after he died his daughter gave the ledgers to a friend in Chanute, Kansas—Nora Cunningham—who read the narrative, became fascinated by it, and typed it for publication. Reinhart's account, written in a grammar and language all his own, is not a record of the historian's West, but of the West of the individual miner. The pages are filled with the details of day-to-day life of the miners—the subjects that interested them, the problems that plagued them, their fun and feuding, their frustrations and hopes. Edited by an authority of the history of the West, it is a book that will offer exciting reading to casual readers and scholars alike.
Author: S. Steinberg
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230270786
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1554
Get Book Here
Book Description
The classic reference work that provides annually updated information on the countries of the world.
Author: M. Epstein
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230270751
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1492
Get Book Here
Book Description
The classic reference work that provides annually updated information on the countries of the world.
Author: Richard A. Bartlett
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816511099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this handsome volume, the author discusses the region from geologic times until its withdrawal by an act of Congress as our first national park' in 1872. . . .This is an exceptionally fine book, a noteworthy blending of scholarly and popular history. Bartlett knows his subject well, both as a student and as an outdoorsman. ÑPacific Northwest Quarterly "A timely work; its mission' is to make the reader wish to have seen Yellowstone before the people came.' The author must be commended for writing a scholarly book with appeal for a popular audience." ÑJournal of American History "A joy for the recreational reader and a solid reference for scholarly researchers . . .The author has been both energetic and fortunate in gathering material from a rich variety of original accounts and later writings, and he has used them skillfully." ÑWestern Historical Quarterly
Author: Ella Elizabeth Clark
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520239265
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Get Book Here
Book Description
50th anniversary edition of a perennial best seller. Tales from the oral tradition of the Indians in the Pacific Northwest.
