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Works Progress Administration (WPA)

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Park ranger looking at slides
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The Case of the Missing Park Posters: Ex-Ranger Hunts for New Deal-Era Art

A former park ranger is on the hunt to complete a collection of posters by artists commissioned by the government celebrating national parks.
via Retro Report on October 11, 2023
Women gathered around Eleanor Roosevelt at Camp Tera.

The New Deal Program that Sent Women to Summer Camp

About 8,500 women attended the camps inspired by the CCC and organized by Eleanor Roosevelt—but the "She-She-She" program was mocked and eventually abandoned.
by Erin Blakemore via HISTORY on July 7, 2020
Carl Reiner on stage holding a microphone.

Carl Reiner’s Life Should Remind Us: If You Like Laughing, Thank FDR and the New Deal

Reiner, Stephen Colbert, Jordan Peele, Steve Carrell, Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus: Their comedy descends directly from the Works Progress Administration.
by Jon Schwarz via The Intercept on July 4, 2020
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
summer campers around a fire
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Around the Campfire with Paul Robeson

The history of Camp Wo-Chi-Ca tells a largely overlooked story about left-wing politics and Black culture.
by Nina Silber via HNN on August 6, 2024
Poster for the WPA theatrical production of "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis

Stealing the Show

Why conservatives killed America’s federally funded theater.
by Charlie Tyson via The Yale Review on June 10, 2024
Disabled children learning in a classroom at Washington Boulevard School.

Disabling Modernism

During the first decade of the New Deal, modernist architects designed schools for disabled children that proposed radical visions of civic care.
by David Serlin via Places Journal on May 15, 2024
Jack Conroy

Jack Conroy and the Lost Era of Proletarian Literature

In the midst of the Depression, Conroy helped encourage a new generation of working-class writers.
by Devin Thomas O’Shea via The Nation on April 30, 2024
Untitled (Strike), Dox Thrash, c. 1940.

Hard Times

The radical art of the Depression years.
by Rachel Himes via The Nation on November 27, 2023
Farmer sits on porch while behind him child stares through window and dust storm envelopes farm.

Working-Class Artists Thrived in the New Deal Era

During the New Deal, mass left movements and government funding spawned a boomlet in working-class art. For once, art wasn’t just the province of the rich.
by Liza Featherstone via Jacobin on October 16, 2023
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
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 Real History of Race and the New Deal

Material benefits trumped FDR's terrible civil rights records.
by Matthew Yglesias via Slow Boring on December 11, 2020
A graphic for the Federal Theatre Project.

Can We Save American Theater by Reviving a Bold Idea from the 1930s?

The Federal Theatre Project put dramatic artists to work — and we could do it again.
by Wendy Smith via The National Book Review on November 1, 2020
Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks during coronavirus briefing
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Cities and States Need Aid — But Also Oversight

Federal funding during and after the New Deal ended up hurting cities because of who spent it and how.
by Brent Cebul, Daniel Wortel-London via Made By History on May 4, 2020

Privatizing the Public City

Oakland’s lopsided boom.
by Mitchell Schwarzer via Places Journal on May 1, 2019
original

Infrastructure is Good for Business

During the Depression, business leaders knew that public works funding was key to economic growth. Why have we forgotten that lesson?
by Brent Cebul on March 12, 2018

Why Federal Employees Can Thank FDR for Some Restrictions on Their Tweets

The Hatch Act was crafted in response to New Deal-era political maneuvering.
by Olivia B. Waxman via TIME on April 3, 2017

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
A political cartoon of Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a crow on his shoulder, representing Jim Crow.

The Not-So-New Deal

The New Deal brought Black voters over to the Democratic Party, but was marred by racial inequality.
by C. Vann Woodward via New York Review of Books on December 8, 1983
National Public Housing Museum

At the National Public Housing Museum, an Embattled Idea Finds a Home

Chicago’s latest museum looks to change the narrative around the federally supported housing projects that US cities turned their backs on decades ago.
by Zach Mortice via CityLab on April 25, 2025
The Griffith Observatory, constructed by the Works Progress Administration, on a hill overlooking Los Angeles.

A New Deal for Architecture

What it conveys is quite specific: grandeur, beauty, dynamism, and power.
by David Schaengold via Compact on December 20, 2024
Blair LM Kelley

Talking Black Joy and Black Freedom with Blair LM Kelley

“The world didn’t give It, but the world can’t take It away.”
by Regina Bradley, Blair LM Kelley via Public Books on December 16, 2024
Aerial view of big buildings, wide roads, open parking lots, and affordable housing from "Project One" in Newport, Virginia.

Urban Renewal in Virginia

Urban landscapes and communities all across the state of Virginia still bear the scars of urban renewal.
via Encyclopedia Virginia on September 19, 2024
Aaron Douglas, detail from painting Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction, 1934.

The Cosmopolitan Modernism of the Harlem Renaissance

The world-spanning art of the Harlem Renaissance.
by Rachel Himes via The Nation on April 9, 2024
Mount Harkness Fire Lookout in California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park.

Historic Fire Lookout Towers Are Burning Down in Today’s Megafires

One of the country’s oldest fire lookouts was destroyed last year in the largest wildfire in California’s history. What else is being lost?
by Hannah Kingsley-Ma via The New Republic on September 7, 2022
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
Actors on stage in "One-Third of a Nation." Library of Congress.

The Living Newspaper Speaks

Scripted from front-page news, the Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspaper plays were part entertainment, part protest, and entirely educational.
by Betsy Golden Kellem via JSTOR Daily on May 25, 2022
Statue of three women scientists.

The Unsung Heroes Who Ended a Deadly Plague

How a team of fearless American women overcame medical skepticism to stop whooping cough, a vicious infectious disease, and save countless lives.
by Richard Conniff via Smithsonian on February 23, 2022
Marie Bankhead Owen sitting for portrait picture with title "State of Denial" printed next to her

How a Confederate Daughter Rewrote Alabama History for White Supremacy

Marie Bankhead Owen led campaigns to purge anti-Confederate lessons from Southern classrooms, and all but erased Black history from the Alabama state archives.
by Kyle Whitmire via al.com on February 16, 2022
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