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 ...

When These Are Our Lives was first published by The University of North Carolina Press in 1939, the late Charles A. Beard hailed it as “literature more powerful than anything I have read in fiction, not excluding Zola’s most vehement passages.” A very early experiment in the publication of oral history, it consisted of thirty–five life histories of sharecroppers, farmers, mill workers, townspeople, and the unemployed of the Southeast, selected from over a thousand such histories c...

The influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not tho...

A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick“A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don’t know how to live properly.” —Zadie SmithOne of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the wri...

Thomas Sowell's incisive critique of the intellectuals' destructive role in shaping ideas about race in America*Intellectuals and Race is a radical book in the original sense of one that goes to the root of the problem. The role of intellectuals in racial strife is explored in an international context that puts the American experience in a wholly new light.The views of individual intellectuals have spanned the spectrum, but the views of intellectuals as a w...

Their Eyes Were Watching God is a 1937 novel and the best known work by African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston. The novel narrates main character Janie Crawford's "ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny". Set in central and southern Florida in the early 20th century, the novel was initially poorly received for its rejection of racial uplift literary prescriptions. Today, it has come to be rega...

How did immigrants to the United States come to see themselves as white?David R. Roediger has been in the vanguard of the study of race and labor in American history for decades. He first came to prominence as the author of The Wages of Whiteness, a classic study of racism in the development of a white working class in nineteenth-century America. In Working Toward Whiteness, Roediger continues that history into the twentieth century. He recounts ho...

In this lively narrative, award-winning author Michael Kammen presents a fascinating analysis of cutting-edge art and artists and their unique ability to both delight and provoke us. He illuminates America’s obsession with public memorials and the changing role of art and museums in our society. From Thomas Eakins’s 1875 masterpiece The Gross Clinic, (considered “too big, bold, and gory” when first exhibited) to the bitter disputes about Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial, this is an...

Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers' Project 1936-1938, assembled by the Library of Congress Project, Work Projects Administration (WPA), sponsored by the Library of Congress, and first published in 1941. As explained in the introduction: "The present Library of Congress Project, under the sponsorship of the Library of Congress, is a unit of the Public Activities Program of the Community Service Programs of the Work Projects Administration for the District of Columbia. Acco...

"A major and challenging work. . . . Provocative, and certain to be controversial. . . . Will add important new dimension to the continuing debate on the decline of liberalism." —William Julius Wilson, New York Times Book ReviewCan we continue to believe in progress? In this sobering analysis of the Western human condition, Christopher Lasch seeks the answer in a history of the struggle between two ideas: one is the idea of progress - an idea driven by the conviction that ...

First-Hand Accounts of Slavery in America. With active Table of contents. Hundreds of former slaves were interviewed during the depression as part of the WPA project sponsored by the Library of Congress. This file includes all parts dealing with former slaves in Florida. Other files, published separately, focus on other southern states. In all, there are some two thousand narratives from the following seventeen states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Marylan...

Based on the author's more than 50 years of experience as a professional historian in academic and other capacities, Being a Historian is addressed to both aspiring and mature historians. It offers an overview of the state of the discipline of history today and the problems that confront it and its practitioners in many professions. James M. Banner, Jr argues that historians remain inadequately prepared for their rapidly changing professional world and that the discipline as a whole has ye...