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Federal Writers' Project

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Montana poster from the Works Projects Administration.

How WPA State Guides Fused the Essential and the Eccentric

Touring the American soul.
by Scott Borchert via Humanities on October 11, 2023
Images of girls in a factory

Layered Lives

Rhetoric and representation in the Southern Life History Project.
by Lauren Tilton, Taylor Arnold, Courtney Rivard via Stanford University Press on August 30, 2022
Nelson Algren sititing under a bridge

When the Government Supported Writers

Government support created jobs, built trust, and invigorated American literature. We should try it again.
by Max Holleran via The New Republic on June 15, 2021

The Enduring Lessons of a New Deal Writers Project

The case for a Federal Writers' Project 2.0.
by Jon Allsop via Columbia Journalism Review on December 22, 2020

Abraham Lincoln's Secret Visits to Slaves

Former slaves claimed the president came to plantations disguised as a beggar or a peddler, telling them they’d soon be free. 
by Bill Black via The Atlantic on February 12, 2018

Is the Greatest Collection of Slave Narratives Tainted by Racism?

How Depression-Era racial dynamics may have shaped our understanding of antebellum enslaved life.
by Rebecca Onion via Slate on July 6, 2016
Roscoe Lewis sets up to record an interview of formerly enslaved people in Petersburg, Va., as part of the Federal Writers’ Project. (Hampton University Archives)

How Researchers Preserved the Oral Histories of Formerly Enslaved Virginians

In the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project interviewed 300 formerly enslaved Virginians to share their oral histories.
by David A. Taylor via Washington Post Magazine on July 19, 2022
Photograph of a former slave interviewed by the Federal Writers' Projects

Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It

The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past.
by Clint Smith via The Atlantic on February 9, 2021
Zora Neale Hurston in a bookstore with a copy of 'American Stuff'

How Did Artists Survive the First Great Depression?

What is the role of artists in a crisis?
by David A. Taylor via Literary Hub on June 29, 2020

The Haunting of Drums and Shadows

On the stories and landscapes the Federal Writers’ Project left unexplored.
by Sam Worley via Lapham’s Quarterly on May 11, 2020
Lucindy Lawrence Jurdan stands at her spinning wheel.

Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938

A collection of more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 photos of former slaves.
via Library of Congress on January 1, 2015
Collage of African Americans' faces.

Specters of the Mythic South

How plantation fiction fixed ghost stories to Black Americans.
by Alena Pirok via Southern Cultures on January 24, 2024
Vintage drawing of a rural area with snowfall. In the foreground, two horses are pulling a man in a cart on the snowy road.

Cox’s Snow and the Persistence of Weather Memory

One of the worst snowstorms recorded in Virginia’s history began on Sunday, January 17, 1857. It remained in Virginians' collective memories eighty years later.
by Patricia Miller via Encyclopedia Virginia on January 5, 2022
1836 lithograph of a slave trader marching enslaved people to be sold.

Partners in Brutality

New books investigate the brutality of the internal slave trade by focusing on businesses, and examine the role of white women in enslaving Black people.
by Nicholas Guyatt via New York Review of Books on October 18, 2021
Collage of a man's photograph within a cutout of another man

Searching for Mr. X

For eight years, a man without a memory lived among strangers at a hospital in Mississippi. But was recovering his identity the happy ending he was looking for?
by Laura Todd Carns via The Atavist on September 20, 2021
A group of formerly enslaved people at a county almshouse, c. 1900.

Juneteenth Is About Freedom

On Juneteenth, we should remember both the struggle against chattel slavery and the struggle for radical freedom during Reconstruction.
by Dale Kretz via Jacobin on June 19, 2021
A painting entitled Our Town, with Black children playing on a suburban street

The Truth About Black Freedom

This year’s Juneteenth commemorations must take a deeper look at the history of Black self-liberation to understand what emancipation really means.
by Daina Ramey Berry via The Atlantic on June 18, 2021

The Lessons of the Great Depression

In the 1930s, Americans responded to economic calamity by creating a richer and more equitable society. We can do it again.
by Lizabeth Cohen via The Atlantic on May 17, 2020
Dam from a distance

The Book of the Dead

In Fayette County, West Virginia, expanding the document of disaster.
by Catherine Venable Moore via Oxford American on December 6, 2016
Painting by Chima Ikegwuonu depicting the Igbo Landing mass suicide, with a slave trader standing over handcuffed Igbo men on a ship, while other Igbo men resolutely entering the water.

Igbo Landing Mass Suicide

In 1803 one of the largest mass suicides of enslaved people took place when Igbo captives from what is now Nigeria were taken to the Georgia coast.
by Samuel Momodu via BlackPast on October 25, 2016

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