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This book examines posters produced by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal relief program designed to create jobs in the United States during the Great Depression. Cory Pillen focuses on several issues addressed repeatedly in the roughly 2,200 extant WPA posters created between 1935 and 1943: recreation and leisure, conservation, health and disease, and public housing. As the book shows, the posters promote specific forms of knowledge and literacy as solutions to contemporary social concerns. The varied issues these works engage and the ideals they endorse, however, would have resonated in complex ways with the posters' diverse viewing public, working both for and against the rhetoric of consensus employed by New Deal agencies in defining and managing the relationship between self and society in modern America. This book will be of interest to scholars in design history, art history, and American studies. Cover image: Don (Chester) C. Powell. Washington D.C. WPA, Department of the Interior, National Park Service, c. 1938. Silkscreen Print. Digital Image courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, WPA Poster Collection, LC-DIG-ppmsca-13397.

As a New Deal program, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) aimed to put unemployed writers, teachers, and librarians to work. The contributors were to collect information, write essays, conduct interviews, and edit material with the goal of producing guidebooks in each of the then forty-eight states and U.S. territories. Project administrators hoped that these guides, known as the American Guide Series, would promote a national appreciation for America's history, culture, and diversity and preserve democracy at a time when militarism was on the rise and parts of the world were dominated by fascism. Marilyn Irvin Holt focuses on the Nebraska project, which was one of the most prolific branches of the national program. Best remembered for its state guide and series of folklore and pioneer pamphlets, the project also produced town guides, published a volume on African Americans in Nebraska, and created an ethnic study of Italians in Omaha. InNebraska during the New Deal Holt examines Nebraska's contribution to the project, both in terms of its place within the national FWP as well as its operation in comparison to other state projects.

It was 1933, and Walker Evans needed money. The photographer had already begun to gain notice for his dispassionate yet poetic photographs, which had been featured in some key gallery exhibitions and publications; later that year, curator and cultural critic Lincoln Kirstein would arrange for Evans to exhibit his images of Victorian architecture at the newly founded Museum of Modern Art in New York. But at the height of the Depression in New York, there were only a few ways a photographer could ply his skills and get paid. Evans's friend and roommate, the artist Ben Shahn, connected him with Edith Halpert, impresario of the Downtown Gallery, who exhibited Shahn's work along with that of other American painters. Only two years earlier Halpert had expanded her program to open the American Folk Art Gallery with curator and art historian Holger Cahill. She hired Evans to make copy photographs of her growing inventory, which he saw as a banal but not entirely unpleasant way to earn an income behind the camera. He wrote to his friend Hanns Skolle, 'The work I have been doing for cash wouldn't interest you any more than it does me. At the moment, though, there is a lot of 50 copies to be made for the Downtown Gallery of American folk painting and objects, and that job is not so bad.. .I could support myself copying paintings I think but don't relish the work.'1This commercial side job shows up as a mere footnote in Evans's biographies if it shows up at all: indeed, it is typical of the myriad employments artists undertake to make their art while putting food on the table. But this humble copy work underscores a surprising connection between the seemingly disparate disciplines of American photography and folk art in the 1930s-worlds that were, in fact, united by personal and cultural networks with a shared interest in the American vernacular. Kirstein, for example, had organized back-to-back exhibitions in 1930 at Harvard's Society for Contemporary Art: American Folk Paintings of Three Centuries (featuring the collection of Isabel Carleton Wilde) and Photography (including work by Evans and Berenice Abbott, among others).2 Wilde's renowned folk-art collection would later be displayed in exhibitions organized by Cahill and at the John Becker and Julien Levy galleries (which also showed photographs), and she eventually sold many of her works to Edith Halpert. Cahill, who wrote extensively on American folk art at this time, would come to lead the Federal Art Project, which would oversee both the sprawling Index of American Design and Abbott's extensive Changing New York project. The list goes on: of artists, curators, dealers, collectors, writers, and other cultural agents whose work easily straddled these two fields that have since been separated by the academic and museum practices of the past century.

This bookexamines the involvement of African American artists in the New Deal art programs of the 1930s. Emphasizing broader issues informed by the uniqueness of Black experience rather than individual artists’ works, Mary Ann Calo makes the case that the revolutionary vision of these federal art projects is best understood in the context of access to opportunity, mediated by the reality of racial segregation. Focusing primarily on the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Calo documents African American artists’ participation in community art centers in Harlem, in St. Louis, and throughout the South. She examines the internal workings of the Harlem Artists’ Guild, the Guild’s activities during the 1930s, and its alliances with other groups, such as the Artists’ Union and the National Negro Congress. Calo also explores African American artists’ representation in the exhibitions sponsored by WPA administrators and the critical reception of their work. In doing so, she elucidates the evolving meanings of the terms race, culture, and community in the interwar era. The book concludes with an essay by Jacqueline Francis on Black artists in the early 1940s, after the end of the FAP program. Presenting essential new archival information and important insights into the experiences of Black New Deal artists, this study expands the factual record and positions the cumulative evidence within the landscape of critical race studies. It will be welcomed by art historians and American studies scholars specializing in early twentieth-century race relations.

After the stock market crashed in 1929, financially strapped students left high school and college, joining the ranks of approximately five million unemployed young adults. To bring students back to the classroom through a work-study program and to give employment and teach marketable skills to “out-of-school” youth twenty-four years old and younger, President Roosevelt created the National Youth Administration in 1935 with Executive Order 7086. The National Youth Administration was sometimes compared to the Civilian Conservation Corps, but there were notable differences. The National Youth Administration included both men and women, enrolled males too young for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and incorporated work projects similar to those undertaken by the Works Progress Administration. This article focuses on the Kansas experience to illustrate and examine the National Youth Administration’s national policies, implementation, relationship to war work during World War II, and long-term legacy.

The Great Migration was the most significant event in black life since emancipation and Reconstruction. Passionately Human, No Less Divine analyzes the various ways black southerners transformed African American religion in Chicago during their Great Migration northward. A work of religious, urban, and social history, it is the first book-length analysis of the new religious practices and traditions in Chicago that were stimulated by migration and urbanization. The book illustrates how the migration launched a new sacred order among blacks in the city that reflected aspects of both Southern black religion and modern city life. This new sacred order was also largely female as African American women constituted more than 70 percent of the membership in most black Protestant churches. Ultimately, Wallace Best demonstrates how black southerners imparted a folk religious sensibility to Chicago's black churches. In doing so, they ironically recast conceptions of modern, urban African American religion in terms that signified the rural past. In the same way that working class cultural idioms such as jazz and the blues emerged in the secular arena as a means to represent black modernity, he says, African American religion in Chicago, with its negotiation between the past, the present, rural and urban, revealed African American religion in modern form.

The Federal Arts Project (WPA-FAP) (1935-1943) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a federally funded program designed through Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal to keep visual artists at work during the Great Depression. Many of these arts programs took place through museums and exhibitions, bringing the visual arts to everyday Americans with public programs and outreach. The continued legacy of these community-driven, education-centered approaches is evident in today's museums through outreach initiatives, studio programs, and responsive community programs that seek to bring visual arts experiences to the public. This article will discuss key WPA-FAP museum programs and policies, and relate these objectives to current practice in museum education.

During the Second World War, the U.S. Bureau of the Census published a novel population density map for the U.S. that used minor civil divisions as its areal basis. Prior to that time, the national-level area measurements required to calculate densities for such sub-county units were unavailable. The data that enabled the production of the map published in 1942 were collected by clerical workers who were employed as part of a joint project between the Census Bureau and the Works Progress Administration. The area measurements, made using planimeters, were used with 1940 Census of Population data to compute densities that are represented on the map using a choropleth technique.

\"How much does it cost?\" We think of this question as one that preoccupies the nation's shoppers, not its statesmen. But, asPocketbook Politicsdramatically shows, the twentieth-century American polity in fact developed in response to that very consumer concern. In this groundbreaking study, Meg Jacobs demonstrates how pocketbook politics provided the engine for American political conflict throughout the twentieth century. From Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon, national politics turned on public anger over the high cost of living. Beginning with the explosion of prices at the turn of the century, every strike, demonstration, and boycott was, in effect, a protest against rising prices and inadequate income. On one side, a reform coalition of ordinary Americans, mass retailers, and national politicians fought for laws and policies that promoted militant unionism, government price controls, and a Keynesian program of full employment. On the other, small businessmen fiercely resisted this low-price, high-wage agenda that threatened to bankrupt them. This book recaptures this dramatic struggle, beginning with the immigrant Jewish, Irish, and Italian women who flocked to Edward Filene's famous Boston bargain basement that opened in 1909 and ending with the Great Inflation of the 1970s. Pocketbook Politicsoffers a new interpretation of state power by integrating popular politics and elite policymaking. Unlike most social historians who focus exclusively on consumers at the grass-roots, Jacobs breaks new methodological ground by insisting on the centrality of national politics and the state in the nearly century-long fight to fulfill the American Dream of abundance.

In 1937, Mexican workers were among the strikers and supporters beaten, arrested, and murdered by Chicago policemen in the now infamous Republic Steel Mill Strike. Using this event as a springboard, Zaragosa Vargas embarks on the first full-scale history of the Mexican-American labor movement in twentieth-century America. Absorbing and meticulously researched, Labor Rights Are Civil Rightspaints a multifaceted portrait of the complexities and contours of the Mexican American struggle for equality from the 1930s to the postwar era. Drawing on extensive archival research, Vargas focuses on the large Mexican American communities in Texas, Colorado, and California. As he explains, the Great Depression heightened the struggles of Spanish speaking blue-collar workers, and employers began to define citizenship to exclude Mexicans from political rights and erect barriers to resistance. Mexican Americans faced hostility and repatriation. The mounting strife resulted in strikes by Mexican fruit and vegetable farmers. This collective action, combined with involvement in the Communist party, led Mexican workers to unionize. Vargas carefully illustrates how union mobilization in agriculture, tobacco, garment, and other industries became an important vehicle for achieving Mexican American labor and civil rights. He details how interracial unionism proved successful in cross-border alliances, in fighting discriminatory hiring practices, in building local unions, in mobilizing against fascism and in fighting brutal racism. No longer willing to accept their inferior status, a rising Mexican American grassroots movement would utilize direct action to achieve equality.