The Wpa Guide To America

Author : Christine Bold
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 9781578061952
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The WPA Guides written by Christine Bold and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1999 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : David A. Taylor
Publisher : Turner Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 0470885882
Total Pages : 307 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Soul of a People written by David A. Taylor and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soul of a People is about a handful of people who were on the Federal Writer's Project in the 1930s and a glimpse of America at a turning point. This particular handful of characters went from poverty to great things later, and included John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Studs Terkel. In the 1930s they were all caught up in an effort to describe America in a series of WPA guides. Through striking images and firsthand accounts, the book reveals their experiences and the most vivid excerpts from selected guides and interviews: Harlem schoolchildren, truckers, Chicago fishmongers, Cuban cigar makers, a Florida midwife, Nebraskan meatpackers, and blind musicians. Drawing on new discoveries from personal collections, archives, and recent biographies, a new picture has emerged in the last decade of how the participants' individual dramas intersected with the larger picture of their subjects. This book illuminates what it felt like to live that experience, how going from joblessness to reporting on their own communities affected artists with varied visions, as well as what feelings such a passage involved: shame humiliation, anger, excitement, nostalgia, and adventure. Also revealed is how the WPA writers anticipated, and perhaps paved the way for, the political movements of the following decades, including the Civil Rights movement, the Women's Right movement, and the Native American rights movement.

Author : Bernard A. Weisberger
Publisher : Pantheon
ISBN 13 : 9780394729596
Total Pages : 462 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The WPA Guide to America written by Bernard A. Weisberger and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 1985 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays from the 1930s discuss each state and region, and their history, folk lore, legends, and major cities

Author : Scott Borchert
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 0374719055
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Republic of Detours written by Scott Borchert and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | Winner of the New Deal Book Award An immersive account of the New Deal project that created state-by-state guidebooks to America, in the midst of the Great Depression—and employed some of the biggest names in American letters The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious—and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of hard-up writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a series of guidebooks to the then forty-eight states—along with hundreds of other publications dedicated to cities, regions, and towns—while also gathering reams of folklore, narratives of formerly enslaved people, and even recipes, all of varying quality, each revealing distinct sensibilities. All this was the singular purview of the Federal Writers’ Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration founded in 1935 to employ jobless writers, from once-bestselling novelists and acclaimed poets to the more dubiously qualified. The FWP took up the lofty goal of rediscovering America in words and soon found itself embroiled in the day’s most heated arguments regarding radical politics, racial inclusion, and the purpose of writing—forcing it to reckon with the promises and failures of both the New Deal and the American experiment itself. Scott Borchert’s Republic of Detours tells the story of this raucous and remarkable undertaking by delving into the experiences of key figures and tracing the FWP from its optimistic early days to its dismemberment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. We observe notable writers at their day jobs, including Nelson Algren, broke and smarting from the failure of his first novel; Zora Neale Hurston, the most widely published Black woman in the country; and Richard Wright, who arrived in the FWP’s chaotic New York City office on an upward career trajectory courtesy of the WPA. Meanwhile, Ralph Ellison, Studs Terkel, John Cheever, and other future literary stars found encouragement and security on the FWP payroll. By way of these and other stories, Borchert illuminates an essentially noble enterprise that sought to create a broad and inclusive self-portrait of America at a time when the nation’s very identity and future were thrown into question. As the United States enters a new era of economic distress, political strife, and culture-industry turmoil, this book’s lessons are urgent and strong.

Author : Joseph Frazier Federal Writers Project
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1587296632
Total Pages : 624 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The WPA Guide to 1930s Iowa written by Joseph Frazier Federal Writers Project and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published during the Great Depression, The WPA Guide nevertheless finds much to celebrate in the heartland of America. Nearly three dozen essays highlight Iowa's demography, economy, and culture but the heart of the book is a detailed traveler's guide, organized as seventeen different tours, that directs the reader to communities of particual social and historical interest.

Author : WPA Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration in Southern California
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520268830
Total Pages : 584 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Los Angeles in the 1930s written by WPA Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration in Southern California and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-04-05 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Previously published: New York: Hastings House, 1941, under the title Los Angeles: a guide to the city and its environs, as part of the American guide series.

Author : Federal Writers' Project
Publisher : Pantheon
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 818 pages
Book Rating : 4.1L/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The WPA Guide to New York City written by Federal Writers' Project and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 1982 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This tour guide for time travelers offers New York lovers and 1930s buffs an endlessly fascinating look at life as it was lived in the days when a trolley ride cost five cents, a room at the Plaza was $7.50, and the new World's Fair was the talk of the town. Hailed by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books ever written about the city. Photos. Maps.

Author : Nick Taylor
Publisher : Bantam
ISBN 13 : 0553381326
Total Pages : 673 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book American-Made written by Nick Taylor and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 : Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration of Northern California
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520275381
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book San Diego in the 1930s written by Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration of Northern California and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: San Diego in the 1930s offers a lively account of the city’s culture, roadside attractions, and history—from the days of the Spanish missions to the pre-Second World War boom. The guide is revealing both in the opinions it embodies and in the juicy details it records—tidbits such as the bloodiest and most incompetently fought battle of the Mexican-American War, Emma Goldman’s abruptly terminated speech to local Wobblies in 1912, and even a delightfully anachronistic way to beat a San Diego speeding ticket. Brimming with tours that can prove challenging to retrace, this book reminds us of the changes wrought by seven decades of intervening war, peace, and biotechnology. Unlatching a remarkable trapdoor into the past, this compact and charming document of the Depression era invites repeated browsing and is generously illustrated with striking black-and-white photographs that bring the period to life.

Author : Works Progress Administration
Publisher : Garrett County Press
ISBN 13 : 189105340X
Total Pages : 519 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book New Orleans City Guide written by Works Progress Administration and published by Garrett County Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1938, under the direction of novelist and historian Lyle Saxon, The Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration produced this delightfully detailed portrait of New Orleans. Containing recipes, photographs and folklore, it is consistently hailed as one of the best books produced about the city. Remarkably, many of the sites and attractions the WPA chronicled in 1938 are still around today.