Download or read book Long Past Slavery written by Catherine A. Stewart and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1936 to 1939, the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project collected life stories from more than 2,300 former African American slaves. These narratives are now widely used as a source to understand the lived experience of those who made the transition from slavery to freedom. But in this examination of the project and its legacy, Catherine A. Stewart shows it was the product of competing visions of the past, as ex-slaves' memories of bondage, emancipation, and life as freedpeople were used to craft arguments for and against full inclusion of African Americans in society. Stewart demonstrates how project administrators, such as the folklorist John Lomax; white and black interviewers, including Zora Neale Hurston; and the ex-slaves themselves fought to shape understandings of black identity. She reveals that some influential project employees were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, intent on memorializing the Old South. Stewart places ex-slaves at the center of debates over black citizenship to illuminate African Americans' struggle to redefine their past as well as their future in the face of formidable opposition. By shedding new light on a critically important episode in the history of race, remembrance, and the legacy of slavery in the United States, Stewart compels readers to rethink a prominent archive used to construct that history.
Download or read book Soul of a People written by David A. Taylor and published by Wiley. This book was released on 2009-02 with total page 280 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.
Download or read book Slave Culture 3 volumes written by Spencer R. Crew and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-05-28 with total page 1264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time, the WPA Slave Narratives are organized by theme, making it easier to examine—and understand—specific aspects of slave life and culture. There is no better way to appreciate history than to experience it through the eyes of those who lived it. Slave Culture: A Documentary Collection of the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project brings together the memories of the last generation of enslaved African Americans gathered through interviews conducted between 1936 and 1938. This three-volume work stands apart from previous Slave Narrative collections in that it organizes the narratives thematically, bringing the rich tapestry of slave culture to life in a fresh way. Within each thematic area, multiple excerpts span time, gender, and geography. An introductory essay for each theme and a contextual explanation for each narrative help readers draw lessons from this vast collection, while an introduction to the work explains the Works Progress Administration's Slave Narrative project—illuminating still another era in American history.
Download or read book America the Dream of My Life written by David Steven Cohen and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This selection is the first statewide collection of life histories from the Social-Ethnic Studies program of the Federal Writers's Project. They represent for ethnic history what the more famous Federal Writers' Project's Slave Narratives have meant for African-American history.
Download or read book Henry Alsberg written by Susan Rubenstein DeMasi and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-07-13 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Great Depression, Henry Alsberg, a journalist with a passion for social justice, directed the Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal program of the Works Progress Administration. Under his guidance, thousands of unemployed writers were hired. Despite attacks from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Project produced more than 1,000 publications from 1935 to 1939, including the still highly acclaimed American Guide series. Some writers, such as Richard Wright, went on to storied careers. Alsberg led the Project's collection of more than 10,000 oral histories from ex-slaves, immigrants and others. Alsberg was also a leader in the struggle to save Jewish pogrom survivors in Eastern Europe. Later, he initiated the first major effort to assist international political prisoners. His friends included anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. This book brings Alsberg to light as an important but forgotten figure of the 20th century.
Download or read book These Are Our Lives written by Regional Staff Federal Writers' Project, Regional Staff and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the relationship between nursing and technology from the 1860s to the present, showing how technology has affected persistent dilemmas in nursing and how it has both advanced and impeded the development of the profession.
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.
Download or read book Pennsylvania a Guide to the Keystone State written by Best Books on and published by Best Books on. This book was released on 1940 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: compiled by workers of the Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration in the state of Pennsylvania ... Co-sponsored by the Pennsylvania Historical Commission and the University of Pennsylvania.
Download or read book Ohio written by Best Books on and published by Best Books on. This book was released on 1940 with total page 749 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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.
Download or read book The WPA Guide to New Orleans written by Federal Writers' Project and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 1938 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Arkansas A Guide to the State written by and published by US History Publishers. This book was released on with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The WPA Guide to Florida written by and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 1939 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Deep End written by Jason Boog and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's tough being an author these days, and it's getting harder. A recent Authors Guild survey showed that the median income for all published authors in 2017, based solely on book-related activities, was just over $3,000, down more than 20% from eight years previously. Roughly 25% of authors earned nothing at all. Price cutting by retailers, notably Amazon, has forced publishers to pay their writers less. A stagnant economy, with only the rich seeing significant income increases, has hit writers along with everyone else. But, as Jason Boog shows in a rich mix of history and politics, this is not the first period when writers have struggled to scratch a living. Between accounts of contemporary layoffs and shrinking paychecks for authors and publishing professionals are stories from the 1930s when writers, hard hit by the Great Depression, fought to create unions and New Deal projects like the Federal Writers Project that helped to put wordsmiths back to work. By revisiting these stories, Boog points the way to how writers today can stand with other progressive forces fighting for economic justice and, in doing so, help save a vital cultural profession under existential threat.
Download or read book California written by Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration of Northern California and published by . This book was released on 1939 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guidebook about the state: its history, natural setting, industries, press and radio, movies, education, arts, and architecture; detailed descriptions of the major cities; and a listing of many tours around California and parts of Nevada. With a chronology of events.
Download or read book Literary Legacies of the Federal Writers Project written by Sara Rutkowski and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-17 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length literary analysis of the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project (FWP)—a massive New Deal program that put thousands to work documenting the country during the Depression. Drawing on critical histories, archival documents, and select works of fiction, the book examines the nature and history of the FWP’s documentary method and its literary imprint, particularly on three key black American writers: Ralph Ellison, Dorothy West, and Margaret Walker. By aiming their documentary lenses so precisely on individual voices, folklore, and cultural communities, FWP writers would ultimately eschew the social realism of thirties culture in favor of themes surrounding personal and cultural identities in the postwar era. This concise volume demonstrates how the FWP served as a repository from which many of the most treasured 20th century writers drew material, techniques, and philosophical direction in ways that would help steer the course of American writing.
Download or read book Such As Us written by Tom E. Terrill and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When These Are Our Lives was first published by The University of North Carolina Press in 1939, the late Charles A. Beard hailed it as "literature more powerful than anything I have read in fiction, not excluding Zola's most vehement passages." A very early experiment in the publication of oral history, it consisted of thirty-five life histories of sharecroppers, farmers, mill workers, townspeople, and the unemployed of the Southeast, selected from over a thousand such histories collected by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s. It was the Press' intention to publish several more volumes from the material that had been amassed, but World War II forced the cancellation of those plans. The editors of Such As Us have taken up the abandoned task and have produced a volume every bit as rich as its predecessor. From the perspective of forty years we can now read these stories as vivid chapters in the social history of the South, reaching as far back as slavery times and as far forward as the eve of World War II. To the modern reader the people speaking in this book may at first seem quaint, like curious from a past time and a different world. They worked on farms, in mills, oil fields, coal mines, and other people's homes. Their life histories provide a view of the world they saw, experienced, and helped to create. They tell about family life, religion, sex roles, being poor, and getting old, and they describe how major events -- the Civil War, Emancipation, World War I, the Great Depression, and the New Deal -- affected them. These accounts offer the reader the chance to experience vicariously the world these people lived in -- to know, for example, the wife of the tenant farmer who commented, "We seem to move around in circles like the mule that pulls the syrup mill. We are never still, but we never get anywhere." Such as Us is a contribution to the history of anonymous Americans. Like the former-slave narratives, which have become an important primary source for the historian, these life histories will enable the reader to reexamine traditional views and address new questions about the South. By providing an introduction and historical interchapters that place the histories in perspective, the editors set these histories within the cultural context of the 1930s and illustrate the relationship between private lives and public events. These life histories allow individuals to reach across time and share their lives with us. Although the people who speak in Such As Us are representatives of social types and classes, they are also unique individuals -- a paradoxical truth their life histories affirm.
