Federal Writers Project

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/19/2022
  

  Inside the New Deal Project to Preserve the Oral Histories of 300 Formerly Enslaved Virginians

  That initiative, led by Howard University’s Sterling Brown, included a plan to interview thousands of formerly enslaved people across the South before they died.

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• SOURCE: JStor Daily
  8/2/2021
  

  The Photographers Who Captured the Great Depression

  Intended as a promotional program for New Deal agricultural programs, the Farm Security Adminstration's sponsorship of Gordon Parks, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and other photographers sparked an aesthetic revolution. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  7/21/2021
  

  Before Nikole Hannah-Jones, Howard U. Professor Sterling Brown was a Lightning Rod for Right-Wing Outrage

  by Carole Emberton

  Sterling Brown also engendered political opposition and debate about what constitutes U.S. history when he tried to center the narrative on the diverse experiences of Black Americans.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  7/6/2021
  

  A New Deal for Writers in America

  by Scott Borchert

  "The best reason to support a new F.W.P. is also the most obvious. Like its predecessor, the project would be an economic rescue plan for writers, broadly defined: workers who have been grappling with a slowly unfolding crisis in their industry for at least a decade."

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  6/15/2021
  

  When the Government Supported Writers

  by Max Holleran

  "With its reminder that creative labor was once seen—like a strategic reserve of fuel, weapons, or medical supplies—as worthy of federal protection, Republic of Detours mobilizes New Deal history to help us imagine what our society would be like if federal tax dollars supported a reserve army of muralists, poets, and oral historians."

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  2/9/2021
  

  Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It

  by Clint Smith

  "The Federal Writers’ Project ex-slave narratives produced tens of thousands of pages of interviews and hundreds of photographs—the largest, and perhaps the most important, archive of testimony from formerly enslaved people in history."

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• SOURCE: LitHub
  7/29/2020
  

  Once Upon a Time, When America Paid Its Writers

  In Jason Boog’s new book, "The Deep End," he offers colorful and often grim profiles of nine Depression-era writers and connects their stories to the struggles that writers face today. Even before our current economic crisis, it was a depressingly apt comparison.

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• SOURCE: Public Books
  6/19/2020
  

  Pencil Leaners

  by Jeff Sparrow

  As Australia considers government support to artistic workers inspired by the US New Deal, important differences in context should be observed.