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New Deal History: Revisited & Revised
News items that discuss and rethink the New Deal and its impact on America.
- Book Review: Americans in a World at WarReview by Victoria Wolcott Blower, Brooke L., Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of PanAm’s Yankee Clipper, Oxford University Press Publication Date: August 29, 2023 Blower’s masterfully researched book, Americans in a World at War, tells the story of the NewDeal and World War II in original and surprising ...
- Book Review: A New Deal for QuiltsReview by Scott Borchert Janneken Smucker’s A New Deal for Quilts, University of Nebraska Press Publication Date: December 2023 Janneken Smucker’s A New Deal for Quilts poses a question few might think to ask: what would happen if you organized a study of the New Deal and the Great Depression entirely around the theme of quilts ...
- New Dealish: The Floating White HouseThe USS Potomac was FDR's retreat from the pressures of the White House. He sometimes hosted advisors and heads of state aboard the Presidential yacht but it also was his getaway for fishing trips, poker games and family gatherings. At least one of FDR’s famed radio chats was broadcast from the ...
- WPA Music Collector Sidney Robertson Discovers California GoldFrom 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 that included yearly trips to Europe in her teens. She ...
- Favorite New Deal Site: To Preserve and Enhance, Riverside Park, New York, NYAs a longtime resident of New York City, it was difficult for me to pick a favorite New Deal site, as there so many possibilities. I was tempted to choose Orchard Beach, in the Bronx, where my father learned to swim in the 1930s, or the former U.S. Customs House ...
- America’s VoicesAmerica’s Voices Within the Resettlement Administration, the New Deal agency charged with relocating struggling families, a little known Music Unit deployed field workers to government-planned communities around the country to boost residents’ morale and solidarity through folk music. Using the latest 1930s technology, the aluminum disk, they recorded hundreds of performances ...
- The New Deal’s Forgotten Song BookThe 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 communities for "displaced populations"—farmers whose land had failed, miners whose ...
- Art for the PeopleArt for the People Perhaps best known for its public works projects, the WPA also employed tens of thousands of actors, musicians, writers and artists through a jobs program collectively known as Federal One. "Hell, they’ve got to eat too,” said FDR's advisor Harry Hopkins, director of New Deal relief programs. ...
- Favorite New Deal Site: A Work of Art, Timberline Lodge, OregonA Work of Art Timberline Lodge, Oregon More than a mile above sea level, Timberline Lodge, about an hour’s drive east of Portland, embodies the New Deal’s aim to make life itself a work of art by wrapping visitors in it. A symphony of craftspeople and artists employed by the ...
- Advocating for New Deal ArtNew 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 of contemporary art in the world. This unprecedented and visionary patronage ...
