News
Our contributors brought to our attention that the historic New Deal mural at the DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx was recently defaced and possibly damaged. A spokesperson from the New York City Department of Education said that the… read more
“It is as if there were places and times in which human activity becomes a whirlpool which gathers force not only from one man’s courage and ambitions and high hopes but from the very tides of disaster and human foolishness… read more
My dad, Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985) was the first photographer hired by the Farm Security Administration, the New Deal agency that pioneered the use of photographs and “photo stories” to build public and political support for federal relief programs. Starting in… read more
Preservation activists in Berkeley, California, worked for years to protect their city’s historic core. In 1998, they achieved National Register of Historic Places status for a 5-block area encompassing the New Deal-era Civic Center Park and 13 buildings—the Beaux Arts-style… read more
The eerie absence of historic signage marking the New Deal’s achievements in New York City is striking, especially given the city’s favored status as a recipient of New Deal funding. Between 1936 and 1937, the Works Progress Administration (WPA)… read more
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) have announced plans to display Diego Rivera’s massive mural, “Pan American Unity,” at a major exhibition of the artist’s work in 2020. The mural is… read more
Franklin Roosevelt was, among many other things, a knowledgeable forester. He frequently described himself as a “grower of trees.” Long before his entrance on the political scene, he spent years reforesting his Hudson River estate at Hyde Park. As governor… read more
The first of three greenbelt towns built and owned by the federal government during the Great Depression, Greenbelt, Maryland, ten miles north of Washington, D.C. was considered “utopian” when it opened in 1937. Greenbelt’s residents had to overcome many obstacles… read more
Born in Mexico in 1905, Anita Brenner, a Jewish American writer and intellectual, lived her life on both sides of the border. Educated in Mexico and the U.S., Brenner explicated Mexican culture to Americans, offering an antidote to the biases… read more
NPR’s All Things Considered featured a story about a public cannery in Prince Edward County, Virginia. A relic of the New Deal era, the public cannery allows members of the pubic to “walk in with bags of produce from their garden and… read more