Two authors share the 2023 New Deal Book Award. The co-winners are:
Brooke Blower, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper (Oxford) and Janneken Smucker, A New Deal for Quilts (International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln).
The review committee thought that each book respectively represented an excellent example of social/historical analysis (Blower) and cultural analysis/history (Smucker).
The committee was also very taken with Derek Leebaert’s Unlikely Heroes (St. Martin’s Press) and has designated it as the “Second Prize” winner.
Given the depth of the pool of 2023 Award nominees, the committee highlighted other excellent books in their final round of deliberation, designating them as “Finalists”.
These books are: Mary Ann Calo and Epilogue by Jacqueline Francis, African American Artists and the New Deal Art Projects; Opportunity, Access, and Community (Penn State University Press); Ira Chernus and Randall Fowler, Something to Fear: FDR and the Foundations of American Insecurity, 1912-1945 (University Press of Kansas); Diana B. Henriques, Taming the Street (Random House); Craig Nelson, V is for Victory: Franklin Roosevelt’s American Revolution and the Triumph of World War II (Scribner); and Josh Sheppard, Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting (University of Illinois Press).
photo credit: Jackie Ricciardi for Boston University Photography
Brooke L. Blower, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper, Oxford University Press, Publication Date: August 29, 2023
Taking off from New York, the celebrated seaplane, the Yankee Clipper island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. Americans in a World at War traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them toward war.
Janneken Smucker, A New Deal for Quilts, International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, Publication Date: December 1, 2023
During the Roosevelt Administration’s efforts to combat the Great Depression, the quilt became an emblem for how to lift one’s family out of poverty, piece by piece. A New Deal for Quilts explores how the U.S. government drew on quilts and quiltmaking, encouraging Americans to create quilts individually and collectively in response to unemployment, displacement, and recovery efforts.
Derek Leebaert, Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made, St. Martin’s Press, Publication Date: February 28, 2023
Only four people – Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, and Henry Wallace – served at the top echelon of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration from the frightening early months of spring 1933 until he died in April 1945, on the cusp of wartime victory. These lieutenants composed the tough, constrictive, long-term core of government. They built the great institutions being raised against the Depression, implemented the New Deal, and they were pivotal to winning World War II.
2023 New Deal Book Nominees
Melissa Estes Blair, Bringing Home the White House, University of Georgia Press
Melissa Estes Blair, Bringing Home the White House, University of Georgia Press, Publication Date: September 1, 2023
In telling the story of the Democratic Party’s Women’s Divisions, Blair reveals the ways that women were central to American politics from the depths of the Great Depression to the height of the Cold War. Starting in 1932, five Division leaders turned tens of thousands of women all over the country into the “saleswomen for the party”.
In the middle decades of the twentieth century both major political parties had Women’s Divisions. The leaders of these divisions—five women who held the job from 1932 until 1958—organized tens of thousands of women all over the country, turning them into the “saleswomen for the party” by providing them with talking points, fliers, and other material they needed to strike up political conversations with their friends and neighbors. The leaders of the Women’s Divisions also produced a huge portion of the media used by the campaigns—over 90 percent of all print material in the 1930s—and were close advisors of the presidents of both parties.
In spite of their importance, these women and their work have been left out of the narratives of midcentury America. In telling the story of these five West Wing women, Blair reveals the ways that women were central to American politics from the depths of the Great Depression to the height of the Cold War.
Brooke L. Blower, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper, Oxford University Press
Brooke L. Blower, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper, Oxford University Press, Publication Date: August 29, 2023
Taking off from New York, the celebrated seaplane, the Yankee Clipper island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. Americans in a World at War traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them toward war.
On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways’ celebrated seaplane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from New York’s Marine Air Terminal and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. Americans in a World at War traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them toward war.
Combat soldiers made up only a small fraction of the millions of Americans, both in and out of uniform, who scattered across six continents during the Second World War. This book uncovers a surprising history of American noncombatants abroad in the years leading into the twentieth century’s most consequential conflict. Long before GIs began storming beaches and liberating towns, Americans had forged extensive political, economic, and personal ties to other parts of the world. These deep and sometimes contradictory engagements, which preceded the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would shape and in turn be transformed by the US war effort.
The intriguing biographies of the Yankee Clipper‘s passengers–among them an Olympic-athlete-turned-export salesman, a Broadway star, a swashbuckling pilot, and two entrepreneurs accused of trading with the enemy–upend conventional American narratives about World War II. As their travels take them from Ukraine, France, Spain, Panama, Cuba, and the Philippines to Java, India, Australia, Britain, Egypt, the Soviet Union, and the Belgian Congo, among other hot spots, their movements defy simple boundaries between home front and war front. Americans in a World at War offers fresh perspectives on a transformative period of US history and global connections during the “American Century.
Mary Ann Calo and Epilogue by Jacqueline Francis, African American Artists and the New Deal Art Projects; Opportunity, Access, and Community, Penn State University Press
Mary Ann Calo and Epilogue by Jacqueline Francis, African American Artists and the New Deal Art Projects; Opportunity, Access, and Community, Penn State University Press, Publication Date: May 16, 2023
This book examines the involvement of African American artists in the New Deal art programs of the 1930s. 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.
This book examines 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.
Brent Cebul, Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century, University of Pennsylvania Press
Brent Cebul, Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century, University of Pennsylvania Press, Publication Date: March 14, 2023
In Illusions of Progress, Brent Cebul chronicles the rise of what he terms “supply-side liberalism,” a powerful and enduring orientation toward politics and the economy, race and poverty, that united local chambers of commerce, liberal policymakers and economists, and urban and rural economic planners.
In Illusions of Progress, Brent Cebul chronicles the rise of what he terms “supply-side liberalism,” a powerful and enduring orientation toward politics and the economy, race and poverty, that united local chambers of commerce, liberal policymakers and economists, and urban and rural economic planners. Beginning in the late 1930s, New Dealers tied expansive aspirations for social and, later, racial progress to a variety of economic development initiatives. In communities across the country, otherwise conservative business elites administered liberal public works, urban redevelopment, and housing programs. But by binding national visions of progress to the local interests of capital, liberals often entrenched the very inequalities of power and opportunity they imagined their programs solving. In this wide-ranging book, Brent Cebul illuminates the often-overlooked structures of governance, markets, and public debt through which America’s warring political ideologies have been expressed and transformed. From Washington, D.C. to the declining Rustbelt and emerging Sunbelt and back again, Illusions of Progress reveals the centrality of public and private forms of profit that have defined the enduring boundaries of American politics, opportunity, and inequality— in an era of liberal ascendance and an age of neoliberal retrenchment.
Ira Chernus and Randall Fowler, Something to Fear: FDR and the Foundations of American Insecurity, 1912-1945University Press of Kansas
Ira Chernus and Randall Fowler, Something to Fear: FDR and the Foundations of American Insecurity, 1912-1945University Press of Kansas, Publication Date: November 17, 2023
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy in foreign affairs has been contested since the day of his passing. Few presidential statements have echoed through history like FDR’s charge to conquer “fear itself.” Yet immediately after the end of World War II, the United States was gripped by a pervasive sense of national insecurity.
A presidency unlike any other, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s legacy in foreign affairs has been contested since the day of his passing. Few presidential statements have echoed through history like FDR’s charge to conquer “fear itself.” Yet immediately after the end of World War II, the United States was gripped by a pervasive sense of national insecurity. In Something to Fear, Ira Chernus and Randall Fowler demonstrate that Roosevelt’s rhetoric, vision, and policies promoted a broadly defined sense of American security over a period of thirty-three years, ultimately helping elevate security to its primacy in US political discourse by the end of his presidency. In doing so, however, he also heightened the prominence of insecurity in American public life, mediating the United States’ transition to superpower status in a way that also elevated fear in debates over foreign affairs. FDR’s presidency precipitated a complex shift in US foreign policy that defies any straightforward account organized along a linear isolationist-to-interventionist trajectory. Chernus and Fowler investigate the uncertainties and contradictions embedded in FDR’s presidential rhetoric, which drew from realist, racial, progressive, nostalgic, apocalyptic, liberal internationalist, and American exceptionalist discourses. In this way, Roosevelt’s rhetoric anticipated the ambivalences contained in American adventures abroad ever since. Something to Fear shows how FDR’s response to the Great Depression, the debates over intervention, and World War II left an immense rhetorical legacy that often stressed insecurity. This study of FDR’s entire political career also carefully links him to the Progressive Era before his presidency and to the Cold War era after it.
Lisa Gail Collins, Stitching Love and Loss, University of Washington Press
Lisa Gail Collins, Stitching Love and Loss, University of Washington Press, Publication Date: June, 2023
In 1942 Missouri Pettway, newly suffering the loss of her husband, pieced together a quilt out of his old, worn work clothes in the small African American farming community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Placing this singular quilt within its historical and cultural context, Collins illuminates the perseverance and creativity of the African American women quilters in this rural Black Belt community.
In 1942 Missouri Pettway, newly suffering the loss of her husband, pieced together a quilt out of his old, worn work clothes. Nearly six decades later her daughter Arlonzia Pettway, approaching eighty at the time and a seasoned quiltmaker herself, readily recalled the cover made by her grieving mother within the small African American farming community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama.
At once a story of grief, a quilt, and a community, Stitching Love and Loss connects Missouri Pettway’s cotton covering to the history of a place, its residents, and the work of mourning. Interpreting varied sources of history and memory, Lisa Gail Collins engages crucial and enduring questions, simultaneously singular and shared: What are the languages, practices, and processes of mourning? How is loss expressed and remembered? What are the roles for creativity in grief? And how might a closely crafted material object, in its conception, construction, use, and memory, serve the work of grieving a loved one? Placing this singular quilt within its historical and cultural context, Collins illuminates the perseverance and creativity of the African American women quilters in this rural Black Belt community.
Christopher C. Gorham, The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WWII and Shape Modern America,Citadel Press, an imprint of Kensington Books
Christopher C. Gorham, The Confidante: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Helped Win WWII and Shape Modern America, Citadel Press, an imprint of Kensington Books, Publication Date: February 21, 2023
In 1928, Eleanor Roosevelt introduced Anna Rosenberg to her husband, who was then running for Governor of New York. FDR put Anna on his team. When Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932, he made Anna Rosenberg the only woman director of massive, dynamic New Deal programs: the NRA and later, Social Security. By the outbreak of war in Europe, Rosenberg was FDR’s unofficial adviser.
With a disarming mix of charm and Tammany-hewn toughness, Anna Rosenberg began her career in public relations in 1920s Manhattan. In 1928, Eleanor Roosevelt introduced her to her husband, who was then running for Governor of New York. FDR put Anna on his team. When Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932, he made Anna Rosenberg the only woman director of massive, dynamic New Deal programs: the NRA and later, Social Security.
By the outbreak of war in Europe, Rosenberg was FDR’s unofficial adviser. By Pearl Harbor, FDR was calling her “my Mrs. Fix-It.” As Franklin Roosevelt’s special envoy to Europe in World War II she went where the president couldn’t go. She was among the first Allied women to enter a liberated concentration camp, and stood in the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s mountain retreat, days after its capture. She guided the direction of the G.I. Bill of Rights and helped safeguard the secrecy of the Manhattan Project. In 1950, she was tapped to become the assistant secretary of defense—the highest position ever held by a woman in the US military—prompting Senator Joe McCarthy to wage an unsuccessful smear campaign against her. Part of what made her a target was her politics: she was known as a true New Dealer, someone who fought tirelessly for causes from racial integration to women’s equality to national health care. Though Anna Rosenberg emerged from modest immigrant beginnings, equipped with only a high school education, she was the real power behind national policies critical to America winning the war and prospering afterward. Astonishingly, her story remains largely forgotten.
More than the story of one remarkable woman, The Confidante explores who gets to be at the forefront of history, and why. Though she was not quite a hidden figure, Rosenberg’s position as “the power behind,” combined with her status as an immigrant and a Jewish woman, served to diminish her importance. In this inspiring, impeccably researched, and revelatory book, Christopher C. Gorham at last affords Anna Rosenberg the recognition she so richly deserves.
Diana Henriques, Taming the Street, Random House, Publication Date: September 12, 2023
Taming the Street tells the epic story of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s battle to regulate Wall Street in the wake of the 1929 Crash and the ensuing Great Depression.
Taming the Street tells the epic story of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s battle to regulate Wall Street in the wake of the 1929 Crash and the ensuing Great Depression. That clash – between two sharply different visions of financial power and federal responsibility – has shaped how “other people’s money” is managed in America to this day.
Jennifer Peoples Hernandez, Belle Baranceanu: Life, Art and the New Deal Renaissance, Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield
Jennifer Peoples Hernandez, Belle Baranceanu: Life, Art and the New Deal Renaissance, Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield, Publication Date: February 2023
In this first biography of artist Belle (Goldschlager) Baranceanu, Jennifer Peoples Hernandez tells the extraordinary story of a woman who rose from humble beginnings to become the most important female muralist in San Diego during the Great Depression and a prominent California Modern artist.
In this first biography of artist Belle (Goldschlager) Baranceanu, Jennifer Peoples Hernandez tells the extraordinary story of a woman who rose from humble beginnings to become the most important female muralist in San Diego during the Great Depression and a prominent California Modern artist. Her meteoric rise in the art world began in Chicago in the 1920s, but the onset of the Great Depression nearly ended her career. Drawing from previously unpublished letters and archival records, Hernandez skillfully weaves Baranceanu’s resilient story into the larger history of the Depression and New Deal in Chicago and San Diego and highlights the success of the government’s work relief programs. For Baranceanu and others fortunate enough to work for the New Deal art projects, the Depression turned out to be a golden age in American art history with a level of government patronage that has been unmatched ever since.
Derek Leebaert, Unlikely Heroes, Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made, St. Martin’s Press
Derek Leebaert, Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made, St. Martin’s Press, Publication Date: February 28, 2023
Only four people – Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, and Henry Wallace – served at the top echelon of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration from the frightening early months of spring 1933 until he died in April 1945, on the cusp of wartime victory. These lieutenants composed the tough, constrictive, long-term core of government. They built the great institutions being raised against the Depression, implemented the New Deal, and they were pivotal to winning World War II.
Only four people served at the top echelon of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration from the frightening early months of spring 1933 until he died in April 1945, on the cusp of wartime victory. These lieutenants composed the tough, constrictive, long-term core of government. They built the great institutions being raised against the Depression, implemented the New Deal, and they were pivotal to winning World War II.
Yet, in their different ways, each was as wounded as the polio-stricken titan. Harry Hopkins, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, and Henry Wallace were also strange outsiders. Up to 1933, none would ever have been considered for high office. Still, each became a world figure, and it would have been exceedingly difficult for Roosevelt to transform the nation without them. In Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Madehistorian Derek Leebaert, by examining the lives of these four, a very different picture emerges of how Americans saved their democracy and rescued civilization overseas. Many of the dangers that they all overcame are troublingly like those America faces today.
Craig Nelson V is for Victory: Franklin Roosevelt’s American Revolution and the Triumph of World War II, Scribner
Craig Nelson V is for Victory: Franklin Roosevelt’s American Revolution and the Triumph of World War II, Scribner, Publication Date: May 23, 2023
Craig Nelson reveals how FDR confronted an American public disinterested in going to war in Europe, skillfully won their support, and pushed government and American industry to build the greatest war machine in history, “the arsenal of democracy” that won World War II.
New York Times bestselling historian Craig Nelson reveals how FDR confronted an American public disinterested in going to war in Europe, skillfully won their support, and pushed government and American industry to build the greatest war machine in history, “the arsenal of democracy” that won World War II.
Michael Nelson,Vaulting Ambition: FDR’s Campaign to Pack the Supreme Court, University Press of Kansas
Michael Nelson,Vaulting Ambition: FDR’s Campaign to Pack the Supreme Court, University Press of Kansas, Publication Date: February 24, 2023
Nothing embodied Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign to lastingly embed the New Deal in the major institutions of American government more than his effort to pack the Supreme Court. Vaulting Ambition presents a balanced assessment of FDR’s 1937 effort to fundamentally change the highest court in the land.
Nothing embodied Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign to lastingly embed the New Deal in the major institutions of American government more than his effort to pack the Supreme Court. Vaulting Ambition, the inaugural volume in the Landmark Presidential Decisions series, presents a balanced assessment of FDR’s 1937 effort to fundamentally change the highest court in the land.
Unlike most work on the subject, Michael Nelson centers his study on the president’s series of decisions to reform the Court, rather than on the Court’s responses. At the heart of the book is an analytical narrative of FDR’s crusade to expand the Court and pack it with those sympathetic to his cause. While keeping this story front and center, Vaulting Ambition also presents the Court-packing effort as part of FDR’s larger campaign to shape the executive branch bureaucracy, Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Democratic Party all in service to enduringly entrench the New Deal into US government and politics.
Although FDR never achieved the mastery over the entire federal government that he sought, his efforts to expand and transform the three branches of government and the Democratic Party were of great consequence and endured long beyond his tenure. Nelson offers a clear understanding of how FDR’s campaign sheds essential light on today’s raging controversy over changing the Supreme Court.
Kelly Pool and Mark Howe, editors, New Deal Archaeology in the West, University of Utah Press
Kelly Pool and Mark Howe, editors, New Deal Archaeology in the West, University of Utah Press, Publication Date: October 19, 2023
This volume shares previously untold stories of New Deal archaeology from across the American West and explores insights into the past revealed by these projects, from 1933 to 1944.
This volume shares previously untold stories of New Deal archaeology from across the American West and explores insights into the past revealed by these projects. From 1933 to 1944, a wide range of archaeological and cultural heritage projects were funded across this country as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The results of work east of the Mississippi River are amply documented in other publications. However, little has been reported or synthesized regarding western archaeological work, its role in economic recovery, or its impact on the direction and knowledge of the discipline. This volume demonstrates that despite regional differences, New Deal-funded archaeological and cultural heritage projects created a legacy of knowledge and practice across the nation.
Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening, Viking/Penguin Random House
Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening, Viking/Penguin Random House, Publication Date: September 26, 2023
In Democracy Awakening, Richardson crafts a compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false history they have led us into authoritarianism –creating a disaffected population and then promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again.
In the midst of the impeachment crisis of 2019, Heather Cox Richardson launched a daily Facebook essay providing the historical background of the daily torrent of news. It soon turned into a newsletter and its readership ballooned to more than 2 million dedicated readers who rely on her plainspoken and informed take on the present and past in America.
In Democracy Awakening, Richardson crafts a compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false history they have led us into authoritarianism — creating a disaffected population and then promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again. She argues that taking our country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation’s true history that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Their dedication to the principles on which this nation was founded has enabled us to renew and expand our commitment to democracy in the past. Richardson sees this history as a roadmap for the nation’s future.
Richardson’s talent is to wrangle our giant, meandering, and confusing news feed into a coherent story that singles out what we should pay attention to, what the precedents are, and what possible paths lie ahead. In her trademark calm prose, she is realistic and optimistic about the future of democracy. Her command of history allows her to pivot effortlessly from the Founders to the abolitionists to Reconstruction to Goldwater to Mitch McConnell, highlighting the political legacies of the New Deal, the lingering fears of socialism, the death of the liberal consensus and birth of “movement conservatism.”
Many books tell us what has happened over the last five years. Democracy Awakening explains how we got to this perilous point, what our history really tells us about ourselves, and what the future of democracy can be.
Christopher Sellers, Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis, University of Georgia Press
Christopher Sellers, Race and the Greening of Atlanta: Inequality, Democracy, and Environmental Politics in an Ascendant Metropolis, University of Georgia Press, Publication Date: October 15, 2023
Race and the Greening of Atlanta turns an environmental lens on Atlanta’s ascent to thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century, framing that ascent, in important part, as a New Deal legacy. This book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser known one on behalf of “the environment.” Both movements owed much to New Deal capitalism’s undermining of concentrated wealth and power, if not racial segregation, in the Jim Crow South.
Race and the Greening of Atlanta turns an environmental lens on Atlanta’s ascent to thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century, framing that ascent, in important part, as a New Deal legacy. Uniquely wide ranging in scale, from the city’s variegated neighborhoods up to its place in regional and national political economies, this book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser known one on behalf of “the environment.” Arising out of Atlanta’s Black and white middle classes respectively, both movements owed much to New Deal capitalism’s undermining of concentrated wealth and power, if not racial segregation, in the Jim Crow South.
Placing these two movements on the same historical page, Christopher C. Sellers spotlights those environmental inequities, ideals, and provocations that catalyzed their divergent political projects. He then follows the intermittent, sometimes vital alliances they struck as civil rights activists tackled poverty, as a new environmental state arose, and as Black politicians began winning elections. Into the 1980s, as a wealth-concentrating style of capitalism returned to the city and Atlanta became a national “poster child” for sprawl, the seedbeds spread both for a national environmental justice movement and for an influential new style of antistatism. Sellers contends that this new conservativism, sweeping the South with an antienvironmentalism and budding white nationalism that echoed the region’s Jim Crow past, once again challenged the democracy that Atlantans, thanks in part to the New Deal, had achieved.
Josh Shepperd, Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting, University of Illinois Press
Josh Shepperd, Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting, University of Illinois Press, Publication Date: May 23, 2023
During the New Deal, the media reform movement constructed an alternative national infrastructure to commercial media to increase equal access to education through technology. Between 1934 and 1952 advocates built the scaffolding for numerous political and cultural programs that ultimately persuaded regulators to issue noncompetitive frequencies for educational broadcasting. The groundwork set during this period became the foundation of public media genres, policy, and the institutional contours of NPR and PBS.
During the New Deal, the media reform movement convened the construction of an alternative national infrastructure to commercial media to increase equal access to education through technology. Beginning with the Communications Act of 1934, which privatized the American media ownership model, Shadow of the New Deal examines the trial-and-error and experimental nature of educational broadcasting as it lobbied for radio and television frequencies for school districts, adult education, and rural distance learning. Between 1934 and 1952 advocates built the scaffolding for numerous political and cultural programs that ultimately persuaded regulators to issue noncompetitive frequencies for educational broadcasting. The groundwork set during this period became the foundation of public media genres, policy, and the institutional contours of NPR and PBS. Chapters examine the different players dedicated to noncommercial media during the New Deal, including a newly formed Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the clearing house work of the Office of Education, financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation, and the early rise of public policy research, which was developed to provide new forms of data for regulatory agencies about the how audiences understood radio curriculum and mediated information. The emergence of public media in the US took the shape of bottom-up movement unified by the potential and promise that the New Deal might contribute communication tools that would help build a better society.
Janneken Smucker, A New Deal for Quilts, International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
Janneken Smucker, A New Deal for Quilts, International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Publication Date: December 1, 2023
During the Roosevelt Administration’s efforts to combat the Great Depression, the quilt became an emblem for how to lift one’s family out of poverty, piece by piece. A New Deal for Quilts explores how the U.S. government drew on quilts and quiltmaking, encouraging Americans to create quilts individually and collectively in response to unemployment, displacement, and recovery efforts.
During the Roosevelt Administration’s efforts to combat the Great Depression, the quilt became an emblem for how to lift one’s family out of poverty, piece by piece. A New Deal for Quilts explores how the U.S. government drew on quilts and quiltmaking, encouraging Americans to create quilts individually and collectively in response to unemployment, displacement, and recovery efforts. Quilters shared their perspectives on New Deal programs including the Tennessee Valley Authority and the National Recovery Administration and sent quilts as gifts to the Roosevelts and other officials. Federal programs used quilts’ symbolic heft to communicate the values and behaviors individuals should embrace amid the Depression, perceiving the practical potential of crafts to lift morale and impart new skills. The government embraced quilts to demonstrate the efficacy of its programs, show women how they could contribute to their families’ betterment, and generate empathy for impoverished Americans. With over one hundred period photographs and images of quilts, the book evokes the visual environment of the Depression while conveying ways craft, work, race, poverty, and politics intersected during this pivotal era.
The winning titles and authors have been announced. The 2023 Award, with a prize of $1,000, will be presented at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library June 22, 2024.
