All in this Together

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Dear Friends of the Living New Deal, Like you, we’re rattled. As of today at midnight, the 7 million people living in the Bay Area were put under “lock down” to arrest the spread of the corona virus. Schools, shops,… read more

WPA Music Collector Sidney Robertson Discovers California Gold

From 1938 to 1940, Sidney Robertson directed and carried out a remarkable ethnomusicological survey—the WPA California Folk Music Project. Born in San Francisco in 1903, Sidney had grown up in a privileged home punctuated by high cultural activities and training… read more

The New Deal’s Forgotten Song Book

The Resettlement Administration (RA) was a sprawling New Deal agency created in 1935 to oversee a disparate set of government initiatives, most of which focused on providing help in rural areas. This included an experimental program to build new homestead… read more

Advocating for New Deal Art

New Deal art programs ushered in a watershed decade for American art. From 1933 to 1943, federal art programs hired tens of thousands of unemployed artists, producing over 200,000 artworks, and temporarily making the federal government the single largest patron… read more

Quilts Embody the New Deal, Practically and Symbolically

During the Great Depression, quiltmaking was a popular activity among Americans. Every smalltown and big city newspaper published a quilt pattern column; over 25,000 Americans entered quilts in the massive Sears Century of Progress quilt contest in hopes of winning… read more