About the Symposium

Rewriting America, an anthology of essays about the Federal Writers' Project (2022)

Miss Lou Williams, TX, a formerly enslaved person, interviewed for the FWP. [ca. 1937-38]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Zora Neale Hurston, half-length portrait, standing, facing front, looking at book, American Stuff, at New York Times Book Fair. 1937. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Henry G. Alsberg, Director of the Federal Writers' Project, testifies before the House Committee Investigating Un- American Activities. 1938. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Ralph Ellison, FWP writer, at home (ca. 1950)

Ralph Ellison, half-length portrait, seated holding glasses in one hand and a pencil and paper in the other. [ca. 1950]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

About the Symposium
On June 16th, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress hosted a one-day symposium bringing together the contemporary perspectives of public scholars, documentary producers and curators on the legacy of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP [1935-39]). The free, public event focused attention on the ways in which the Library’s extraordinary archival collection of FWP materials continues to inform and inspire public outreach and interdisciplinary scholarship in fields ranging from public and oral history to journalism to ethnic studies and folklore. The presentations by a wide array of participants had the broader aim of considering how the stories of Americans are central to our diverse national identity and to preserving our democracy.

The program was anchored by contributing authors to the anthology, Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (UMass Press, November 2022), which features a rich array of scholarship on topics including new readings of the narratives of formerly enslaved African Americans, the practice and production of oral history podcasts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and emergent research into the once-obscured work of Asian American and Mexican American writers in the FWP. Other scholars, such as historians John Edgar Tidwell and Catherine Stewart partcipated in roundtable discussions alongside Library curators, folklorists, and media producers.

Alessandro Portelli, the renowned oral historian, traveled to the Library from Italy to deliver the keynote address, in which he situated the FWP within the trajectory of the field and its intersection with current public humanities projects.

The symposium sought to harness the renewed public interest in the FWP that has soared over the past few years, as sharp political divisions and the pandemic have called into question the stability of the American economy, democracy and national identity, much as the crisis of the Great Depression did. Taking place in the 80th anniversary year of the cessation of the FWP in 1943, the symposium aimed to contribute to a new understanding of the FWP, the larger study of American cultural nationalism, and to the never-ending need to rediscover America across the course of American history and its always contested cultural politics. Scholars and policy makers see in its vast archives not only a treasure trove of American history but also a potential guide toward collective recovery. Several books and scores of articles on the topics have been published since 2020 alone. In the summer of 2021, the National Endowment for the Humanities, in conjunction with the Library of Congress, sponsored a summer institute that brought together college faculty from around the country to reevaluate the FWP’s accomplishments. Also in 2021, Representative Ted Lieu (D-California) introduced a bill in the US Congress (and re-introduced it in 2023) calling for a new Writers’ Project to create “a repository that archives the stories of America’s history.”

The symposium was produced with generous support from the American Folklore Society, the Oral History Association, and the Professional Staff Congress: City University of New York.

The webcasts of the roundtables and keynote address follow the order of presentation at the symposium. Consult the participant list on the next tab for speakers' biographies.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Alessandro Portelli is an internationally recognized scholar, teacher and leading figure in public and oral history. He is founder and chairman of the Circolo Gianni Bosio, an independent organization for the study and promotion of people’s cultures, folk music and oral history. He has served as visiting professor, research fellow and in other capacities at several universities worldwide, including Manchester, Aberdeen, Columbia, Kentucky, and Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. He taught American Literature at the Universities of Siena and Rome from 1974 to 2012. From 2004 to 2008 he served as Rome’s Mayor’s advisor on historical memory; in 2005-6 he was a member of Rome’s city council. He In 2013, he was awarded an honorary degree from the National University of La Plata, Argentina. In 2014-15, he was a visiting professor at Princeton University, co-teaching a course on Bruce Springsteen’s America. His book Badlands. Springsteen e l'America: il lavoro e i sogni was published in Italy by Donzelli in 2015.
He has won several prizes for his published work: The Order has Been Carried Out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (Palgrave, 2003) won the Oral History Association Best Book Award; the original Italian edition, L’ordine è già stato eseguito. Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria (Donzelli, 1999) won the Viareggio Book Prize. I Can Almost See the Lights of Home External (with Charles Hardy III, Journal of MultiMedia History, 2, 1999, won the Oral History Association award for best non-print work in oral history. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (Oxford, 2011) won the Weatherford Appalachian Book Prize; the Italian translation, America profonda. Due secoli raccontati da Harlan County, Kentucky (Donzelli, 2012) won the Onofri Book Prize.
In addition to the English translations, his work has been translated into Spanish, Catalan, Finnish, and Portuguese (two collections of his essays have appeared in Brazil and in Portugal). He has published in many academic journals and writes regularly for il manifesto daily in Rome, produces radio programs and has edited a number of records based on his field recordings of Italian folk music. Recently he has curated a collection of music and life stories from immigrants to Italy from different parts of the world: We are not going back: Musiche migranti di resistenza, orgoglio e memoria (2016).

Roundtable I - Politics, Vision, Purpose: Rewriting American Identity

Jerrold Hirsch, emeritus professor of history at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri, is the author of Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), co-editor (with Larry Rogers) of America’s Folklorist: B. A. Botkin and American Culture (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), and co-editor (with Tom Terrill) of Such as Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties (University of North Carolina Press, 1978), a collection of previously unpublished Federal Writers’ Project southern life histories. He has published numerous articles on the FWP, the history of American folklore studies, oral history, and disability history in journals, edited books, and as introductions to books. He is currently working on a study of the creative folklore and writing projects of the FWP and on a biography of B. A. Botkin.

John Edgar Tidwell is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas. For his scholarship, teaching, and service, Washburn University awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Literature in 2014. Before his retirement in 2018, he taught undergraduate and graduate classes in American and African American literatures; major author courses in Gordon Parks, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston; and an introduction to the study of fiction. His areas of research are American and African American literatures. He has edited or coedited eight books, including My Dear Boy: Carrie Hughes’s Letters to Langston Hughes, 1926-1938 (University of Georgia Press, 2013), After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown<(Oxford University Press, 2009), Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press (University Press of Mississippi, 2006), and Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes (University of Missouri Press, 2007). He has published chapters in ten different books. His numerous essays, book reviews, literary dictionary entries, interviews, and a bibliography have appeared in such publications as Callaloo, African American Review, Journal of American History, CLA Journal, and The Langston Hughes Review. With colleagues, he used funding from the Kansas Humanities Council to make Langston’s Lawrence, a short documentary film that examines Langston Hughes’s adolescent years in Lawrence, KS. He holds degrees in English from Washburn University (BA, ‘69), Creighton University (MA, ‘71), and the University of Minnesota (PhD, ‘81).

Sue Rubenstein DeMasi is the author of Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (McFarland, 2016). An academic librarian and professor emeritus at Suffolk County Community College in New York, as well as a dramatic writer and journalist, DeMasi has presented widely on Alsberg and the Federal Writers’ Project. In 2021 she served as a visiting scholar for the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute and hosted a National Archives presentation on the FWP. Her latest writing on Alsberg appears in Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (UMass Press, 2022). The venues at which she has spoken include the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and the University of California, Berkeley. Her play about the FWP, Ten Thousand Stories, was produced at Suffolk County Community College and at Bare Bones Theatre Company on Long Island. DeMasi serves as a National Associate for the Living New Deal, an organization that promotes awareness of the New Deal’s accomplishments. She is also an advisor to David Taylor/Spark Media’s People’s Recorder podcast. She is currently working on a biography of John G. Winant, the first American representative of the International Labour Organization, the first Chairman of the Social Security Board, and the American Ambassador to Britain during World War II.

Catherine A. Stewart is Professor of History at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where she teaches courses in late nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. social and cultural history. Her first book, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine and has been featured in The Atlantic, the New York Times, Slate, and Columbia Review of Journalism. She has been a guest on C-SPAN 3, the New Books Network podcast, and the Center for Brooklyn History Talks. Her work has been published in the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, and Civil War History. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her forthcoming book on African Americans and household labor during the Great Depression.

Sara Rutkowski is associate professor of English at the City University of New York: Kingsborough Community College. Originally from Canada, she completed her doctoral work on the Federal Writers’ Project at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Literary Legacies of the Federal Writers’ Project: Voices of the Depression in the American Postwar Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and the editor of Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers’ Project (UMass Press, 2022). She has also published various essays on writers Ralph Ellison and Nelson Algren and on the cultural and political contexts of twentieth-century American and global literature.

Roundtable II - Recovering Voices in the FWP

Diana Noreen Rivera Noreen Rivera is Associate Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). Her research largely centralizes Mexican American cultural producers via interdisciplinary frameworks across regional, national, transborder, and global geographies. She currently serves as an elected member of the Modern Language Association’s Executive Committee on Race and Ethnicity Studies, and she was a selected participant in the 2022 NEH Summer Faculty Institute: Transnational Dialogues in Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx Studies. She was previously the coordinator of UTRGV's Voices of a Pandemic Oral History Project, a public-facing digital archive, in partnership with the University of Texas at Austin Voices Oral History Center, which preserves stories of Latinx communities affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Her publications appear in Aztlán, Journal of South Texas, Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Chicana/Latina Studies, Oxford Bibliographies as well as in the anthologies Rewriting America and Scholars in COVID Times, edited by Melissa Castillo Planas and Debra A. Castillo, Cornell University Press (forthcoming, September 2023).

Maggie E. Morris Davis will be an Assistant Professor of English at Illinois State University in the fall of 2023. She earned her PhD in English from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her research focuses on class and childhood/youth and how, as social constructions, representations of these concepts enter not only our language, culture, and literatures, but also our classrooms, curricula, and pedagogy. She is most grateful for the generous support of a Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress to pursue archival research toward her project entitled "Finding the Child in the Federal Writers' Project".

Maureen Curtin is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY-Oswego. One time director of the university’s Gender & Women’s Studies program, Maureen teaches courses in feminist and queer theory, literary criticism, 20th c. literature, proletarian literature, and socialism. She published Out of Touch: Skin Tropes and Identities in Woolf, Ellison, Pynchon, and Acker (Routledge, 2003). She is currently working on a book entitled, "She was a cool one”: Recuperating Multiracial Class Struggle in Irish American Literature. Along with Michele Fazio, she is also co-editing Working through the Federal Writers’ Project: Labor, Place, Archive, and Representation.

James Sun is a historian, educator, and research analyst whose interest in Asian American history stems from both their Chinese-American identity growing up in Midwestern suburbia and a strong desire to learn more about the world around them. They co-authored two book chapters about Asian American writers for the New Deal Era’s Federal Writers’ Project and authored an article about immigration during the Chinese Exclusion Era with the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. At Yale University, they majored in Global Affairs and Statistics & Data Science, with a minor in Chinese. Their work involves researching about people from the Asian diaspora, teaching various disciplines, and mentoring students of all ages. Currently, they work at RMI, an environmental non-profit.

Greg Robinson is professor of history at l’Université du Québec à Montréal, a French-language institution in Montreal, Canada. A specialist in North American ethnic studies and US political history, he is the author of several notable books, including By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard University Press, 2001), A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (Columbia University Press, 2009), After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (University of California Press, 2012), and The Great Unknown: Japanese American Sketches (University Press of Colorado, 2016). He writes regular columns for the San Francisco Nichi Bei News and for the blog Discover Nikkei. His most recent book is The Unsung Great: Stories of Extraordinary Japanese Americans (University of Washington Press, 2020).

Barbara Bair is a historian and curator of Literature, Culture, and the Arts in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. She oversees the U.S. Works Projects Administration Records manuscript collection, including records of the Federal Writers’ Project stemming from the American Guide (state guides) series, the Folklore project, the Slave Narratives project, and other special project records pertaining to sociocultural history and folkways, as well as the Ralph Ellison Papers and related collections. Collaborating with others across the many programs at the Library of Congress, she helps provide public and virtual events and collections outreach, exhibition content, digital humanities presentations, Indigenous community collaborations, teaching with primary documents, and crowd-sourcing transcription projects. Barbara holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in American Studies from Brown University, where she specialized in women’s and African American literature, U.S. cultural and labor studies, and art and public history. She is a documentary editor of projects in the areas of Black nationalism, Cherokee and popular culture history, and women’s history and the settlement house movement, and author of Though Justice Sleeps: African Americans 1880-1900 (Oxford University Press).

Roundtable III - Surveying the Contemporary Scene: Archival Resources In Creative Culture and Media Productions

C. Zawadi Morris is a journalist, founder of The Original Media Group, Original Media for Non-Profit and the publisher of The Brooklyn Reader (bkreader.com), a digital daily news site that covers Brooklyn, New York. Ms. Morris has worked as a teaching artist in Media Arts at Bed-Stuy Restoration Corporation and is a board member of The Center for Black Literature. Ms. Morris is the founder of the COVID-19 Writers Project(C19WP), a multimedia initaiative that captures a hyperlocal viewpoint of the coronavirus pandemic from inside one of the virus’s hotspots– Brooklyn, NYC. Inspired by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) which spawned the Federal Writers Project (FWP), the C19WP presents first-person oral and written narratives of 30 Brooklyn residents through Zoom video interviews, essays and photography captured and compiled over a course of 6 months in 2020. Funded by National Geographic and The Pulitzer Center, C19WP examines the extent to which socio-economic outcomes are impacted by healthcare, education and race. C19WP has been turned into a student lesson plan by The Pulitzer Center. Ms. Morris has a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Illinois and a Master’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University. Most recently, Ms. Morris received the 2022 Brooklyn NAACP Freedom Star Award for her “contributions to the Black Brooklyn Community.“ {Due to a scheduling conflict, Ms. Morris could not appear in person; her presentation took the form of a video reording.]

Catherine Hiebert Kerst served as a Folklife Specialist (Archivist/Cataloger) at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center for 27 years. She was trained as a folklorist and has experience in archival work, public sector cultural programming, reference services and educational outreach. During the past few years, Kerst has researched folk music collector Sidney Robertson Cowell’s 1938-40 WPA project, housed at the Library. Her book on the subject, California Gold: Sidney Robertson and the WPA California Folk Music Project is scheduled to be published by the University of California Press in association with the Library of Congress in the spring of 2024. At the American Folklife Center, Kerst developed the AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus and served as coordinator of several symposia, including "Literatura de Cordel: Continuity and Change in Brazilian Popular Literature" (2011) and "Cultural Heritage Archives Symposium: Network, Innovation & Collaboration" (2013). In the 1990s, Kerst served as curator for the Iowa Program of the Festival of American Folklife at the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. In 2008, she received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach a seminar for MA Folklore students at the Center for Folklore Studies, University of Calicut, Kerala, India. Kerst received her MA in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a PhD through the Folklife Program, American Studies Department, at George Washington University.

David A. Taylor is the author of Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America (Wiley, 2009), which was ranked among Best Books of the Year by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as well as Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II (Johns Hopkins University Press). He was lead writer and co-producer of the Smithsonian Channel documentary film Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story (2009), which received a Writers Guild Award nomination. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Smithsonian, The American Scholar, and Oxford American. He is currently producing a podcast about the FWP with Spark Media and state humanities support called The People's Recorder (www.peoplesrecorder.info). He teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University.

Guha Shankar is Senior Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. At the Center he collaboratively develops a range of multi-media productions, documentary projects and public outreach initiatives. His work focuses on expressive cultural traditions, community life and social justice movements, such as the podcast series "Voices from the Days of Slavery: Stories, Songs and Memories," that draws upon New Deal-era archival recordings of formerly enslaved African Americans. He serves as co-director of the Civil Rights History Project, an initiative to document, preserve and provide access to born-digital oral histories with activists in the Black Freedom Struggle. Shankar is the coordinator of Ancestral Voices, a collections management and co-curation project undertaken in collaboration with indigenous communities. He also conducts workshops in ethnographic research methods and skills-based training in field documentation in a range of communities and institutions. Shankar earned his Ph.D. in 2003 from the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, with a concentration in Folklore and Public Culture.

Roundtable IV - Surveying the Contemporary Scene: Public Humanities and Education

Deborah Mutnick is professor of English at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus. She is author of Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education (Boynton/Cook 1996); and coeditor with Shannon Carter, Steven Parks, and Jessica Pauszek of Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era (Routledge 2019); and coeditor with Margaret Cuonzo, Carole Griffiths, Timothy Leslie, and Jay Shuttleworth of The City Is an Ecosystem: Sustainable Education, Policy, and Practice (Routledge 2023). Her work has appeared in scholarly journals, including College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and Community Literacy Journal, and numerous edited collections. She is the recipient of several National Endowment for the Humanities grants, including one for a 2021 Summer Institute for College and University Teachers on the New Deal Era’s Federal Writers’ Project. Currently, she is completing a book about the enduring relevance of Richard Wright’s life and work to twenty-first century America and the wider world that became his second home.

Michele Fazio is Professor of English, director of the Pembroke Mellon REACH Program, and co-coordinator of the Gender Studies Minor at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke where she teaches courses on 20th century American literature, contemporary U.S. ethnic literature, and working-class studies using service-learning. Her film, Voices of the Lumbee (2014), received the Studs Terkel Award for Media and Journalism and the North Carolina Folklore Society Brown-Hudson Award. She has served as president of the Working-Class Studies Association and co-edited the Routledge International Handbook of Working-Class Studies (2021). Her current book project explores the cultural legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti. Along with Maureen Curtin, she is also co-editing the proposed volume Working through the Federal Writers’ Project: Labor, Place, Archive, and Representation.

Anna F. Kaplan, PhD, is a scholar and oral historian in Washington, DC, who specializes in memory and public narratives about race in the US South. She is a Professorial Lecturer and Resident Public Historian at American University and serves as the President of the Board for Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region and a co-chair of the Oral History Association’s Diversity Committee and Equity Audit Task Force. Anna is also a recipient of a 2022-2023 OHA/NEH mini-grant in support of her research project highlighting how pivotal Black women’s labors were in establishing oral history programs and centers at institutions in the mid-20^th century US. She is also working on her manuscript Left by the Wayside: The Struggle over Control of the Memory of the University of Mississippi’s Desegregation, which examines the use of memory to shape public narratives, challenging the notion that the University of Mississippi (UM) integrated in 1962 by reframing it as desegregation and the fight for integration as ongoing. She was a participant in the 2021 NEH Summer Institute “The New Deal Era’s Federal Writers’ Project History, Politics, and Legacy,” and has worked on oral history and public history projects with the Department of State, National Park Service, the DC Oral History Collaborative, several Smithsonian Institution museums, and the US Golf Association Museum. Anna earned her PhD in History at American University and MA’s in Oral History and Anthropology at Columbia University.

Benji de la Piedra works on oral history projects and teaches oral history methodology in a variety of settings, including the University of the District of Columbia, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, the DC Oral History Collaborative, Marin (Calif.) Academy, and the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Community Museum. He is writing a biography of the Washington Post journalist Herbert Denton Jr., and directs the Herbert Denton Biography Project at UDC. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center for Scholars, carrying out independent scholarship on the worlds and work of Denton, Albert Murray, and Ralph Ellison. He is an active member of the Oral History Association, where he serves on the Diversity Committee, Equity Audit Task Force, Indigenous Caucus, and is co-chairing the organization's 2023 conference on "Oral History As/And Education." He received an M.A. in Oral History from Columbia University, NY.

Blogs

The United States vs. Sterling A. Brown – Tidwell,John Edgar (November 16th, 2023)

“Re-writing America”: AFC Symposium on the Federal Writers’ Project - Shankar, Guha (June 16, 2023)

Books and Essays

The Enduring Lessons of a New Deal Writers Project. by Alson, Jon
Allson, Jon. The Enduring Lessons of a New Deal Writers Project. Columbia Journalism Review, 22 Dec. 2020
First-Person America by Banks, Ann
ISBN: 0394747968
Publication Date: 1981-10-01
Between 1938 and 1942 the Federal Writers' project set out to create a first-person portrait of America by sending young writers - many of whom later became famous - around the country to interview people from all occupations and backgrounds. This book presents 80 of these diverse life histories, including the stories of a North Carolina patent-medicine pitchman, a retired Oregon prospector, a Bahamian midwife from Florida, recent immigrants to New York, a Key West smuggler, Chicago jazz musicians.
A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Voices of an American Community by Bascom, Lionel C.
ISBN: 0380799022
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
More than fifty "lost" essays by Dorothy West, Ralph Ellison, and others portray Harlem during the Great Depression, the finest period of self-discovery in African-American history between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's. Written for the FWP, these forgotten writings capture the voices of war veterans, Pullman porters, prostitutes, preachers, and even the black trail blazer who became the first American to reach the North Pole. From the "rent party" described by Frank Byrd, where paying guests "partook freely of fried chicken, pork chops, pigs feet, and potato salad, not to mention homemade "crawn liquor" to Dorothy West's portrayal of Amateur Night at the Apollo, it is an essential historical record of the African-American experience.
Men at Work: Rediscovering Depression-era Stories from the Federal Writers' Project by Basso. Matthew
ISBN: 9781607811893
Publication Date: 2012-09-30
As part of Roosevelt's New Deal program of the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided relief jobs to millions of Americans. One facet of the WPA was the hiring of men and women to document the history and folklore of America so as to capture the 'soul' of the nation. Works of fiction that have a creative nonfiction feel, these re-discovered narratives stem from direct observation of or participation in the work described and offer portraits of Americans from diverse ethnic backgrounds who labored in jobs as varied as logging, mining, fruit packing, and rodeo riding. The vivid accounts in Men at Work illuminate the meaning of work during a time when jobs were scarce and manual labor highly valued.
Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems by Blassingame, John
ISBN: 0195032764
Publication Date: 1985-05-16
Blassingame, John W. “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems.” In The Slave’s Narrative, Eds. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 77–98
These autobiographies of Afro-American ex-slaves comprise the largest body of literature produced by slaves in human history. The book consists of three sections: selected reviews of slave narratives, dating from 1750 to 1861; essays examining how such narratives serve as historical material;and essays exploring the narratives as literary artifacts.
The WPA Guides: Mapping America by Bold, Christine
ISBN: 1578061946
Publication Date: 1999-11-30
In 1935 the FDR administration put 40,000 unemployed artists to work in four federal arts projects. The main contribution of the Federal Writers Project was the American Guide Series, a collectively composed set of guidebooks to every state, most regions, and many cities, towns, and villages across the United States. The 400 guidebooks the teams produced have been widely celebrated as icons of American democracy and diversity. The author looks at the guidebook for each of five distinctively different locations -- Idaho, New York City, North Carolina, Missouri, and U.S. One and the Oregon Trail--to assess the editorial plotting of such issues as gender, race, ethnicity, and class. As regionalists jostled with federal officialdom, the faul-tlines of the project gaped open.
The Deep End by Boog, Jason
ISBN: 9781935928911
Publication Date: 2020-07-09
It's tough being an author these days, and it's getting harder. A recent Authors Guild survey showed that the median income for all published authors in 2017, based solely on book-related activities, was just over $3,000, down more than 20% from eight years previously. Roughly 25% of authors earned nothing at all. Price cutting by retailers, notably Amazon, has forced publishers to pay their writers less. A stagnant economy, with only the rich seeing significant income increases, has hitwriters along with everyone else. But, as Jason Boog shows in a rich mix of history and politics, this is not the first period when writers have struggled to scratch a living. Between accounts of contemporary layoffs and shrinking paychecks for authors and publishing professionals are stories from the 1930s when writers, hard hit by the Great Depression, fought to create unions and New Deal projects like the Federal Writers Project that helped to put wordsmiths back to work. By revisiting these stories, Boog points the way to how writers today can stand with other progressive forces fighting for economic justice and, in doing so, help save a vital cultural profession under existential threat.
Republic of Detours: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America by Borchert, Scott
ISBN: 9780374298456
Publication Date: 2021-06-15
Take thousands of hard-up writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a series of guidebooks to the then forty-eight states--along with hundreds of other publications dedicated to cities, regions, and towns--while also gathering reams of folklore, narratives of formerly enslaved people, and even recipes, all of varying quality, each revealing distinct sensibilities. All this was the singular purview of the Federal Writers' Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration founded in 1935 to employ jobless writers, from once-bestselling novelists and acclaimed poets to the more dubiously qualified. The FWP took up the lofty goal of rediscovering America in words and soon found itself embroiled in the day's most heated arguments regarding radical politics, racial inclusion, and the purpose of writing--forcing it to reckon with the promises and failures of both the New Deal and the American experiment itself. Borchert illuminates an essentially noble enterprise that sought to create a broad and inclusive self-portrait of America at a time when the nation's very identity and future were thrown into question.
On Dialect Usage by Brown, Sterling A
ISBN: 0195032764
Publication Date: 1985-05-16
Brown, Sterling A. On Dialect Usage.1937. Rpt. In The Slave’s Narrative. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ( Eds.) New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 37-39.
Dark Mirror: African Americans and the Federal Writers' Project by Butts, J. J.
ISBN: 0814214770
Publication Date: 2021-09-06
J.J. Butts highlights the conflicting understandings of culture and modernity that pervaded the New Deal's most ambitious and important cultural project of the 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP). FWP guidebooks produced by African American writers such as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison introduced an inclusive, pluralist understanding of the nation's culture and history. Using sociological discourses of urban pathology, they justified rebuilding landscapes to remedy social ills as part of a broader agenda for modernization. Dark Mirror shows how FWP guidebooks sought to minimize the tensions between pluralism and modernization, often at the expense of the former. It also demonstrates how Black FWP authors responded to these ideas in FWP texts and in their own narrative and documentary writing. Highlighting the deep racial currents undercutting the promises of the welfare state, these texts provide what Richard Wright called a "dark mirror" for the nation, setting up new modes of engagement with liberalism and reshaping African American literature.
Writing Democracy: Notes on a Federal Writers’ Project for the 21st Century by Carter, Shannon and Deborah Mutnick
Carter, Shannon and Deborah Mutnick. Writing Democracy: Notes on a Federal Writers’ Project for the 21st Century. Community Literacy Journal, vol. 7, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-14
Preface by Couch, William T.
ISBN: 0393007634
Publication Date: 1975-03-01
Couch, W.T. Preface. These Are Our Lives. Federal Writers' Project Staff. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill., 1939. pp. ix - xx.
Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force of the New Deal Federal Writers' Project by DeMasi, Susan Rubenstein
ISBN: 9780786495351
Publication Date: 2016-06-20
During the Great Depression, Henry Alsberg, a journalist with a passion for social justice, directed the Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal program of the Works Progress Administration. Under his guidance, thousands of unemployed writers were hired. Despite attacks from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Project produced more than 1,000 publications from 1935 to 1939, including the still highly acclaimed American Guide series. Some writers, such as Richard Wright, went on to storied careers. Alsberg led the Project's collection of more than 10,000 oral histories from ex-slaves, immigrants and others. Alsberg was also a leader in the struggle to save Jewish pogrom survivors in Eastern Europe. Later, he initiated the first major effort to assist international political prisoners. His friends included anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. This book brings Alsberg to light as an important but forgotten figure of the 20th century.
The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers by Dolinar, Brian (Editor)
ISBN: 9780252037696
Publication Date: 2013-07-02
The Negro in Illinois was produced by a special division of the Illinois Writers' Project, one of President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration programs. Headed by Harlem Renaissance poet Arna Bontemps and white proletarian writer Jack Conroy, The Negro in Illinois employed Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Katherine Dunham, Fenton Johnson, Frank Yerby, Richard Durham, and other major black writers living in Chicago. The authors chronicled the African American experience in Illinois from the beginnings of slavery to the Great Migration. Individual chapters discuss various aspects of public and domestic life, recreation, politics, religion, literature, and performing arts. After the project's cancellation in 1942, most of the writings went unpublished for more than half a century--until now. Editor Brian Dolinar provides an informative introduction and epilogue which explain the origins of the project and place it in the context of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
To Walk about in Freedom; The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner by Emberton, Carole
ISBN: 9781324001829
Publication Date: 2022-03-08
Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation.. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged--feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage. Her life story--candidly recounted in an oral history for the Federal Writers' Project--captures the intimate nature of freedom. Historian Carole Emberton uncovers the deeply personal, emotional journeys of freedom's charter generation--the people born into slavery who walked into a new world of freedom during the Civil War. Although Joyner was educated at a Freedmen's Bureau school and married a man she loved, slavery cast a long shadow. Uncertainty about her parentage haunted her life, and as Jim Crow took hold throughout the South, segregation, disfranchisement, and racial violence threatened the loving home she made for her family. But through it all, she found beauty in the world and added to it where she could. To Walk About in Freedom gives us a kaleidoscopic look at the lived experiences of emancipation and challenges us to think anew about the consequences of failing to reckon with the afterlife of slavery.
American Stuff; An Anthology of Prose and Verse by Members of the Federal Writers' Project, with Sixteen Prints by the Federal Art Project by Federal Writers' Project
Publication Date: 1937
The Achievement of the Federal Writers’ Project by Fox, Daniel M.
Fox, Daniel M. The Achievement of the Federal Writers’ Project. American Quarterly, vol. 13. no. 1, 1961, pp. 3-19.
American Guides: The Federal Writers' Project and the Casting of American Culture by Griswold, Wendy
ISBN: 9780226357669
Publication Date: 2016-08-26
In the midst of the Great Depression, Americans were nearly universally literate--and they were hungry for the written word. Magazines, novels, and newspapers littered the floors of parlors and tenements alike. With an eye to this market and as a response to devastating unemployment, Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration created the Federal Writers' Project. The Project's mission was simple: jobs. But, as Wendy Griswold shows in the lively and persuasive American Guides, the Project had a profound--and unintended--cultural impact that went far beyond the writers' paychecks. Griswold's subject here is the Project's American Guides, an impressively produced series that set out not only to direct travelers on which routes to take and what to see throughout the country, but also to celebrate the distinctive characteristics of each individual state. Griswold finds that the series unintentionally diversified American literary culture's cast of characters--promoting women, minority, and rural writers--while it also institutionalized the innovative idea that American culture comes in state-shaped boxes. Griswold's story alters our customary ideas about cultural change as a gradual process, revealing how diversity is often the result of politically strategic decisions and bureaucratic logic, as well as of the conflicts between snobbish metropolitan intellectuals and stubborn locals. American Guides reveals the significance of cultural federalism and the indelible impact that the Federal Writers' Project continues to have on the American literary landscape.
Native Geography: Richard Wright’s Work for the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago by Hathaway, Rosemary
ISBN: 1062-4783
Hathaway, Rosemary. Native Geography: Richard Wright’s Work for the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago. African American Review, vol 42, no. 1, 2008, pp. 91-108.
Portrait of America by Hirsch, Jerrold
ISBN: 0807828173
Publication Date: 2003-10-13
How well do we know our country? Whom do we include when we use the word "American"? These are not just contemporary issues but recurring questions Americans have asked themselves throughout their history--and questions that were addressed when, in 1935, the Roosevelt administration created the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. Although the immediate context of the FWP was work relief, national FWP officials developed programs that spoke to much larger and longer-standing debates over the nature of American identity and culture and the very definition of who was an American. Hirsch reviews the founding of the FWP and the significance of its American Guide series, considering the choices made by administrators who wanted to celebrate diversity as a positive aspect of American cultural identity. In his exploration of the FWP's other writings, Hirsch discusses the project's pioneering use of oral history in interviews with ordinary southerners, ex-slaves, ethnic minorities, and industrial workers. He also examines congressional critics of the FWP vision; the occasional opposition of local Federal Writers, especially in the South; and how the FWP's vision changed in response to the challenge of World War II. In the course of this study, Hirsch raises thought-provoking questions about the relationships between diversity and unity, government and culture, and, ultimately, culture and democracy.
Federal Writers' Project by Hirsch, Jerrold
ISBN: 9781108429382
Publication Date: 2018-11-15
Hirsch, Jerrold. Federal Writers’ Project, in American Literature in Transition, 1930-1940, ed. Ichiro Takayoshi, Cambridge UP, 2018.
American Literature in Transition, 1930-1940 gathers together in a single volume preeminent critics and historians to offer an authoritative, analytic, and theoretically advanced account of the Depression era's key literary events. Many topics of canonical importance, such as protest literature, Hollywood fiction, the culture industry, and populism, receive fresh treatment. The book also covers emerging areas of interest, such as radio drama, bestsellers, religious fiction, internationalism, and middlebrow domestic fiction. Traditionally, scholars have treated each one of these issues in isolation. This volume situates all the significant literary developments of the 1930s within a single and capacious vision that discloses their hidden structural relations - their contradictions, similarities, and reciprocities. This is an excellent resource for undergraduate, graduate students, and scholars interested in American literary culture of the 1930s.
They Were Her Property by Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E.
ISBN: 9780300218664
Publication Date: 2019-02-19
Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.
The Ethnographic Experience: Sidney Robertson Cowell in Northern California by Kerst, Catherine Hiebert
Kerst, Catherine Hiebert. “The Ethnographic Experience: Sidney Robertson Cowell in Northern California.” In California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. -= https://bit.ly/3O0Vocs
The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943 by Mangione, Jerre
ISBN: 0815604157
Publication Date: 1996-11-30
Almost 7000 authors-including Richard Wright, John Cheever, and Saul Bellow-were employed by this federal program, which saved many literary careers during the Depression and which also produced the best state guidebooks ever written.
Democratic Art by Musher, Sharon Ann
ISBN: 9780226247182
Publication Date: 2015-05-04
Throughout the Great Recession American artists and public art endowments have had to fight for government support to keep themselves afloat. It wasn't always this way. At its height in 1935, the New Deal devoted $27 million--roughly $461 million today--to supporting tens of thousands of needy artists, who used that support to create more than 100,000 works. Why did the government become so involved with these artists, and why weren't these projects considered a frivolous waste of funds, as surely many would be today? In Democratic Art, Sharon Musher explores these questions and uses them as a springboard for an examination of the role art can and should play in contemporary society. Drawing on close readings of government-funded architecture, murals, plays, writing, and photographs, Democratic Art examines the New Deal's diverse cultural initiatives and outlines five perspectives on art that were prominent at the time: art as grandeur, enrichment, weapon, experience, and subversion. Musher argues that those engaged in New Deal art were part of an explicitly cultural agenda that sought not just to create art but to democratize and Americanize it as well. By tracing a range of aesthetic visions that flourished during the 1930s, this highly original book outlines the successes, shortcomings, and lessons of the golden age of government funding for the arts.
Toward a Twenty-First Century Federal Writers’ Project by Mutnick, Deborah
ISBN: 0010-0994
Mutnick, Deborah. Toward a Twenty-First Century Federal Writers’ Project. College English vol. 77, no. 2, 2014, pp. 124-45
They Say in Harlan County by Alessandro Portelli
ISBN: 9780199735686
Publication Date: 2010-11-10
Made famous in the 1976 documentary Harlan County USA, this pocket of Appalachian coal country has been home to generations of miners--and to some of the most bitter labor battles of the 20th century. They Say in Harlan County is not a book about coal miners so much as a dialogue in which more than 150 Harlan County women and men tell the story of their region, from pioneer times through the dramatic strikes of the 1930s and '70s, up to the present. Alessandro Portelli, one of the giants of the oral history movement, draws on 25 years of original interviews to take readers into the mines and inside the lives of those who work, suffer, and often die in them--from black lung, falling rock, suffocation, or simply from work that can be literally backbreaking. The book is structured as a vividmontage of all these voices - stoic, outraged, grief-stricken, defiant - skillfully interwoven with documents from archives, newspapers, literary works, and the author's own participating and critical voice. Portelli uncovers the whole history and memory of the United States in this one symbolic place, through settlement, civil war, slavery, industrialization, immigration, labor conflict, technological change, migration, strip mining, environmental and social crises, and resistance. They Say in Harlan County tells the real story of a culture, the resilience of its people, and the human costs of coal mining.
Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue by Alessandro Portelli
ISBN: 9780299153748
Publication Date: 1997-05-15
This text, which takes it's title from a student protest of the 1960s in which the author took part, reflects on how to connect personal memories with history and how to fittingly collect and represent the complexity of memory.
The Text and the Voice : Writing, Speaking, and Democracy in American Literature by Alessandro Portelli
ISBN: 0231084986
Publication Date: 1994-08-25
This assessment of American literary history explores the ways in which the interplay of written and oral forms shaped the foundations of both national literature and political identity. It examines numerous texts, written from colonial to modern times, considering how speech and writing interact.
Literary Legacies of the Federal Writers' Project by Rutkowski, Sara
ISBN: 9783319537771
Publication Date: 2018-07-25
The first book-length literary analysis of the WPA's Federal Writers' Project (FWP)--a massive New Deal program that put thousands to work documenting the country during the Depression. Drawing on critical histories, archival documents, and select works of fiction, the book examines the nature and history of the FWP's documentary method and its literary imprint, particularly on three key black American writers: Ralph Ellison, Dorothy West, and Margaret Walker. By aiming their documentary lenses so precisely on individual voices, folklore, and cultural communities, FWP writers would ultimately eschew the social realism of thirties culture in favor of themes surrounding personal and cultural identities in the postwar era. This concise volume demonstrates how the FWP served as a repository from which many of the most treasured 20th century writers drew material, techniques, and philosophical direction in ways that would help steer the course of American writing.
Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers' Project by Rutkowski, Sara (Editor)
ISBN: 9781625347008
Publication Date: 2022-12-30
Established in 1935, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent over 6,500 unemployed historians, teachers, writers, and librarians out to document America's past and present in the midst of the Great Depression. The English poet W. H. Auden referred to this New Deal program as "one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state." Featuring original work by scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives, this edited collection provides fresh insights into how this extraordinary program helped transform American culture. In addition to examining some of the major twentieth-century writers whose careers the FWP helped to launch--including Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Margaret Walker--Rewriting America presents new perspectives on the role of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and women on the project. Essays also address how the project's goals continue to resonate with contemporary realities in the midst of major economic and cultural upheaval. Along with the volume editor, contributors include Adam Arenson, Sue Rubenstein DeMasi, Racheal Harris, Jerrold Hirsch, Kathi King, Maiko Mine, Deborah Mutnick, Diane Noreen Rivera, Greg Robinson, Robert Singer, James Sun, and David A. Taylor.
Nelson Algren’s Personalism: The Influence of the Federal Writers’ Project by Rutkowski, Sara.
Call Number: PS374.N29 S78
ISBN: 1578061946
Rutkowski, Sara. “Nelson Algren’s Personalism: The Influence of the Federal Writers’ Project.” Studies in American Naturalism, vol. 9, no. 2, 2014, pp. 198-223.
How to See Colorado: The Federal Writers’ Project, American Regionalism, and the "Old New Western History" by Schulten, Susan
ISBN: 0043-3810
Schulten, Susan. “How to See Colorado: The Federal Writers’ Project, American Regionalism, and the ‘Old New Western History.’” The Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 1, 2005, pp. 49-70.
Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers' Project by Stewart, Catherine A.
ISBN: 9781469626260
Publication Date: 2016-04-25
From 1936 to 1939, the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project collected life stories from more than 2,300 former African American slaves. These narratives are now widely used as a source to understand the lived experience of those who made the transition from slavery to freedom. But in this examination of the project and its legacy, Catherine A. Stewart shows it was the product of competing visions of the past, as ex-slaves' memories of bondage, emancipation, and life as freed people were used to craft arguments for and against full inclusion of African Americans in society. Stewart demonstrates how project administrators, such as the folklorist John Lomax; white and black interviewers, including Zora Neale Hurston; and the ex-slaves themselves fought to shape understandings of black identity. She reveals that some influential project employees were also members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, intent on memorializing the Old South. Stewart places ex-slaves at the center of debates over black citizenship to illuminate African Americans' struggle to redefine their past as well as their future in the face of formidable opposition. By shedding new light on a critically important episode in the history of race, remembrance, and the legacy of slavery in the United States, Stewart compels readers to rethink a prominent archive used to construct that history.
Soul of a People by Taylor, David A.
ISBN: 0470403802
Publication Date: 2009-02-01
Soul of a People is about a handful of people who were on the Federal Writer's Project in the 1930s and a glimpse of America at a turning point. This particular handful of characters went from poverty to great things later, and included John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Studs Terkel. In the 1930s they were all caught up in an effort to describe America in a series of WPA guides. Through striking images and firsthand accounts, the book reveals their experiences and the most vivid excerpts from selected guides and interviews: Harlem schoolchildren, truckers, Chicago fishmongers, Cuban cigar makers, a Florida midwife, Nebraskan meatpackers, and blind musicians. Drawing on new discoveries from personal collections, archives, and recent biographies, a new picture has emerged in the last decade of how the participants' individual dramas intersected with the larger picture of their subjects. This book illuminates what it felt like to live that experience, how going from joblessness to reporting on their own communities affected artists with varied visions, as well as what feelings such a passage involved: shame humiliation, anger, excitement, nostalgia, and adventure. Also revealed is how the WPA writers anticipated, and perhaps paved the way for, the political movements of the following decades, including the Civil Rights movement, the Women's Right movement, and the Native American rights movement.
Recasting Negro Life History: Sterling A. Brown and the Federal Writers’ Project by Tidwell, John Edgar
ISBN: 0737-0555
Tidwell, John Edgar. “Recasting Negro Life History: Sterling A. Brown and the Federal Writers’ Project.” The Langston Hughes Review, vol. 13, no. 2, 1995, pp. 77-82
The Richer, the Poorer by West, Dorothy
ISBN: 0385471459
Publication Date: 1995-06-01
Short stories and autobiographical essays by West who, at the date of publication, was the only living participant in the Harlem Renaissance; includes her early writing as well as those on contemporary issues.
Exploring the WPA Narratives: Finding the Voices of Black Women and Men by Young, Melvina Johnson
ISBN: 0415073367
Publication Date: 1993-12-06
Young, Melvina Johnson. “Exploring the WPA Narratives: Finding the Voices of Black Women and Men.” In Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women. Stanlie M. James& Abena P. A. Busia (Editors), pp. 55-76

Collections and Digital Resources:

United States. Work Projects Administration records, 1524-1975. Library of Congress Finding Aid.

American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, WPA Federal Writers' Project Collection.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938. Library of Congress Digital Collection.

California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell. Library of Congress Digital Collection.

Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937-1942. Library of Congress Digital Collection.

Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection. Library of Congress Digital Collection.

Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories. Library of Congress Digital Collection.

Voices from the Days of Slavery: Stories, Songs and Memories. American Folklife Center Podcasts.

The Covid-19 Writers Project External. Zawadi Morris and Nigel Roberts.

Reading Slavery, Writing Freedom External. Betsy Bowen.

The New Deal Era's Federal Writers' Project External.

Audio & Video Recordings:

L'America Della Contestazione I Dischi del Sole. External, featuring Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, founder of the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Alessandro Portelli, editor/compiler, disc,1969

Enough to Live On: The Arts of the WPA. External. Michael Maglaras, dir. 217 Films, Video, 2015.

"The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers at Woodson Regional Library in Chicago, Illinois". External C-Span2 Book TV, Chicago, 16 Nov. 2013.

Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story. External , Andrea Kalin, dir. Smithsonian Networks, Video, 2010.

Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives. External. Mark Jonathan Harris, dir. HBO; Video, 2004.

Roundtable I: Politics, Vision, Purpose: Rewriting American Identity; Speakers: Jerrold Hirsch, Sue Rubenstein DeMasi, Catherine Stewart, John Edgar Tidwell, Sara Rutkowski (moderator)

Roundtable II: Recovering Voices in the FWP; Speakers: Maureen Curtin, Maggie Morris Davis, Diana Noreen Rivera, Greg Robinson, James Sun, Barbara Bair (moderator)

Keynote Address: Alessandro Portelli

Roundtable III: Surveying the Contemporary Scene: Archival Resources In Creative Culture and Media Productions; Speakers: C. Zawadi Morris [audiovisual presentation], Catherine Hiebert Kerst, David Taylor, Guha Shankar (moderator)

Roundtable IV: Surveying the Contemporary Scene: Public Humanities and Education; Speakers: Deborah Mutnick, Anna Kaplan, Michele Fazio, Benji de la Piedra (moderator)

Rewriting America: Reconsidering the Federal Writers' Project 80 Years Later

Sr. Folklife Specialist, Research & Programs