The WPA Guide to 1930s Nevada

The WPA Guide to 1930s Nevada
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 418
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN:

When Las Vegas boasted two motion picture theatres and the University of Nevada student population reached a high of twelve hundred, the original edition of The WPA Guide to 1930s Nevada was just coming off the press. First published in 1940 as Nevada: A Guide to the Silver State, part of the Work Projects Administration's American Guide Series, the book remains one of Nevada's premier tour and travel volumes. The WPA Guide to 1930s Nevada includes material on the state's geography and geology, plant and animal life, churches and schools. The native population is discussed, as are the arts, mining, ranching, press, sports, and recreation during the 1930s. The period photographs spread throughout the volume give an excellent picture of Nevada in the early part of the twentieth century and complement the profiles of thirty cities and eight detailed tour descriptions that follow the pattern of the major highway through the state.

The WPA Guide to California

The WPA Guide to California
Author: Federal Writers' Project
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Total Pages: 580
Release: 2013-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1595342044

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor. The guide to California stands out among the rest of the WPA guides for the quality of its writing, photographs, and pen-and-ink drawings. The Golden State contains much diversity of people, places, and things, and the WPA Guide expertly reflects and records the eclectic quality of this quintessentially American state. Published in 1939, the guide’s essays on history cover everything from the gold rush to the movie industry at the nascence of Hollywood’s golden age, and its back-road tours through California's coastal fishing villages and mountain mining towns still provide a splendid alternative to freeways.

The WPA

The WPA
Author: James A. Findlay
Publisher:
Total Pages: 92
Release: 1998
Genre: American guide series
ISBN:

The WPA Guide to Utah

The WPA Guide to Utah
Author: Federal Writers' Project
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Total Pages: 531
Release: 2013-10-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1595342427

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor. Utah, a state which is well known for its distinct religious history, is thoroughly examined in this WPA Guide, with an entire chapter on the relationship between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the state of Utah. The Beehive State, also known for its natural beauty and plentiful resources, also contains several pictures of the Great Salt Lake and mountainous desert landscape as well as an interesting essay on mining.

Nevada

Nevada
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 514
Release: 1992
Genre: Nevada
ISBN:

Global West, American Frontier

Global West, American Frontier
Author: David M. Wrobel
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826353711

This thoughtful examination of a century of travel writing about the American West overturns a variety of popular and academic stereotypes. Looking at both European and American travelers’ accounts of the West, from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, David Wrobel offers a counter narrative to the nation’s romantic entanglement with its western past and suggests the importance of some long-overlooked authors, lively and perceptive witnesses to our history who deserve new attention. Prior to the professionalization of academic disciplines, the reading public gained much of its knowledge about the world from travel writing. Travel writers found a wide and respectful audience for their reports on history, geography, and the natural world, in addition to reporting on aboriginal cultures before the advent of anthropology as a discipline. Although in recent decades western historians have paid little attention to travel writing, Wrobel demonstrates that this genre in fact offers an important and rich understanding of the American West—one that extends and complicates a simple reading of the West that promotes the notions of Manifest Destiny or American exceptionalism. Wrobel finds counterpoints to the mythic West of the nineteenth century in such varied accounts as George Catlin’s Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium (1852), Richard Francis Burton’s The City of the Saints (1861), and Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897), reminders of the messy and contradictory world that people navigated in the past much as they do in the present. His book is a testament to the instructive ways in which the best travel writers have represented the West.

The WPA Guide to 1930s Arizona

The WPA Guide to 1930s Arizona
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 642
Release: 1989
Genre: Travel
ISBN:

Original edition listed in BCL3 under the title: Arizona. Compiled by the Writers' Program of the WPA. New foreword by Stewart Udall.

Sounds of the New Deal

Sounds of the New Deal
Author: Peter Gough
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015-02-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0252097017

At its peak the Federal Music Project (FMP) employed nearly 16,000 people who reached millions of Americans through performances, composing, teaching, and folksong collection and transcription. In Sounds of the New Deal, Peter Gough explores how the FMP's activities in the West shaped a new national appreciation for the diversity of American musical expression. From the onset, administrators and artists debated whether to represent highbrow, popular, or folk music in FMP activities. Though the administration privileged using "good" music to educate the public, in the West local preferences regularly trumped national priorities and allowed diverse vernacular musics to be heard. African American and Hispanic music found unprecedented popularity while the cultural mosaic illuminated by American folksong exemplified the spirit of the Popular Front movement. These new musical expressions combined the radical sensibilities of an invigorated Left with nationalistic impulses. At the same time, they blended traditional patriotic themes with an awareness of the country's varied ethnic musical heritage and vast--but endangered--store of grassroots music.

The Old Iron Road

The Old Iron Road
Author: David Haward Bain
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 469
Release: 2022-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1496235177

In the summer of 2000 David Haward Bain and his family left their home in Vermont and headed west in search of America’s past. Spiritually, their journey began on a Kansas trail where the author’s grandmother was born in a covered wagon in 1889. Between the Missouri River and the Golden Gate, they retraced the entire route of the first transcontinental railroad and large stretches of the Oregon and California trails, and the equally colorful old Lincoln Highway. Following vanished iron rails and wagon wheel ruts, bumping down backroads and main streets, they discovered the deep, restless, uniquely American spirit of adventure that connects our past to our present. A superb writer and an exacting researcher, Bain conjures up a marvelous sense of coming unstuck in time as he lingers in the ghost towns and battlegrounds, prairies and river ports, trainyards, museums, deserts, and diners that line his cruise west to California. Bain encounters a fascinating cast of characters, both historic and contemporary, as well as memories of his grandparents and the journeys that shaped his own heritage. Writing in the tradition of William Least Heat-Moon and Ian Frazier, and with an engaging warmth and a deep grasp of history all his own, Bain has fashioned a quintessentially American journey.