The New Deal in Orange County, California

The New Deal in Orange County, California
Author: Charles Epting
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2014-04-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1625850360

This historical tour explores how FDR’s domestic programs helped revitalize a region devastated by natural disasters and the Great Depression. While many people are familiar with the New Deal’s sweeping initiatives, few have a nuanced sense of what this “alphabet soup” of organizations actually did on a local level. In this fascinating book, historian Christopher Epting looks at the various New Deal projects undertaken in Orange County, showing how they met the myriad needs of its struggling communities. Unpredictably harsh elements wreaked havoc in Orange County during the Great Depression. The Long Beach earthquake of 1933 and the 1938 Santa Ana River flood took numerous lives, decimated buildings and destroyed much of the county's namesake citrus industry. In response, Orange County received federal public aid through the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps and other agencies. Epting reveals their efforts in this tour of the buildings, bridges, harbors, trails, libraries, highways and other infrastructure gains—many still in use—that were revitalized by President Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Orange County Pioneers

Orange County Pioneers
Author: Charles Epting
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2014-11-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1625852878

Orange County's pioneer history is filled with harrowing tales every bit as entertaining as a western novel. These stories, culled from oral histories recorded by old-timers in the 1930s as part of the Works Progress Administration, offer a rarely seen look into Orange County's frontier days. From bear hunts and bullfights to social gatherings at the home of the most famous Shakespearean actress of the day, these tales are a window into the earliest days of every corner of the county. Join editor Charles Epting for these wonderfully evocative portraits of the past recounted in the words of the eyewitnesses.

Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature

Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature
Author: Stephen Fender
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2011-08-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 113663228X

Working through close rhetorical analysis of everything from fiction and journalism to documents and documentaries, this book looks at how popular memory favors the country Depression over the economic crisis in the nation’s cities and factories. Over eighty years after it happened, the Depression still lives on in iconic images of country poor whites – in the novels of John Steinbeck, the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, the documentary films of Pare Lorenz and the thousands of share-croppers’ life histories as taken down by the workers of the Federal Writers’ Project. Like the politicians and bureaucrats who accomplished the New Deal’s radical reforms in banking, social security and labor union law, the artists, novelists and other writers who supported or even worked for the New Deal were idealists, well to the left of center in their politics. Yet when it came to hard times on the American farm, something turned them into unwitting reactionaries. Though they brought these broken lives of the country poor to the notice and sympathy of the public, they also worked unconsciously to undermine their condition. How and why? Fender shows how the answer lies in clues overlooked until now, hidden in their writing -- their journalism and novels, the "life histories" they ghost wrote for their poor white clients, the bureaucratic communications through which they administered these cultural programs, even in the documentary photographs and movies, with their insistent captions and voice-overs. This book is a study of literary examples from in and around the country Depression, and the myths on which they drew.

A New New Deal

A New New Deal
Author: Amy B. Dean
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2011-05-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0801457254

In A New New Deal, the labor movement leaders Amy B. Dean and David B. Reynolds offer a bold new plan to revitalize American labor activism and build a sense of common purpose between labor and community organizations. Dean and Reynolds demonstrate how alliances organized at the regional level are the most effective tool to build a voice for working people in the workplace, community, and halls of government. The authors draw on their own successes to offer in-depth, contemporary case studies of effective labor-community coalitions. They also outline a concrete strategy for building power at the regional level. This pioneering model presents the regional building blocks for national change. A diverse audience—both within the labor movement and among its allies—will welcome this clear, detailed, and inspiring presentation of regional power-building tactics, which include deep coalition-building, leadership development, policy research, and aggressive political action. A New New Deal explores successful coalitions forged in Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, San Jose, New Haven, and Atlanta toward goals such as universal health insurance for children and sensible redevelopment efforts that benefit workers as well as businesses. The authors view partnerships between labor and grassroots organizations as a mutually beneficial strategy based on shared goals, resulting in a broadened membership base and increased organizational capacity. They make the innovative argument that the labor movement can steward both industry and community and make manifest the ways in which workplace battles are not the parochial concerns of isolated workers, but a fundamental struggle for America's future. Drawing on historical parallels, the authors illustrate how long-term collaborations between labor and community organizations are sowing the seeds of a new New Deal.

Victorian Los Angeles

Victorian Los Angeles
Author: Charles Epting
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2015-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 162585143X

Before the oil boom and rise of Hollywood brought today's renowned landmarks to downtown Los Angeles, an entirely different and often forgotten high Victorian city existed. Prior to Union Station, there was the impressive Romanesque Arcade Station of the Southern Pacific line in the 1880s. Before UCLA, the Gothic Revival State Normal School stood in place of today's Los Angeles Public Library. Elsewhere the city held Victorian pleasure gardens, amusement piers and even an ostrich farm, all lost to time and the rapid modernization of a new century. Local author Charles Epting reveals Los Angeles's unknown past at the turn of the twentieth century through the prominent citizens, events and major architectural styles that propelled the growth of a nascent city.

New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee

New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee
Author: David H. Dye
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2016-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0817319050

4. Reinterpreting the Shell Mound Archaic in Western Tennessee: A GIS-Based Approach to Radiocarbon Sampling of New Deal-Era Site Collections - Thaddeus G. Bissett -- 5. Depression-Era Archaeology in the Watts Bar Reservoir, East Tennessee - Shannon Koerner and Jessica Dalton-Carriger -- 6. WPA Excavations at the Mound Bottom and Pack Sites in Middle Tennessee, 1936-1940 - Michael C. Moore, David H. Dye, and Kevin E. Smith -- 7. Reconfiguring the Chickamauga Basin - Lynne P. Sullivan

Masters of the Universe

Masters of the Universe
Author: Daniel Stedman Jones
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2014-07-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691161011

How radical free-market ideas achieved mainstream dominance in postwar America and Britain Based on archival research and interviews with leading participants in the movement, Masters of the Universe traces the ascendancy of neoliberalism from the academy of interwar Europe to supremacy under Reagan and Thatcher and in the decades since. Daniel Stedman Jones argues that there was nothing inevitable about the victory of free-market politics. Far from being the story of the simple triumph of right-wing ideas, the neoliberal breakthrough was contingent on the economic crises of the 1970s and the acceptance of the need for new policies by the political left. This edition includes a new foreword in which the author addresses the relationship between intellectual history and the history of politics and policy. Fascinating, important, and timely, this is a book for anyone who wants to understand the history behind the Anglo-American love affair with the free market, as well as the origins of the current economic crisis.

Rise and Triumph of the California Right, 1945-66

Rise and Triumph of the California Right, 1945-66
Author: Kurt Schuparra
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2016-09-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1315292750

In this, the first book to deal exclusively with conservative politics in California, author Kurt Schuparra pinpoints the myriad factors that led to the formation and rise of the conservative movement in California after World War II, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan as governor in 1966. While Schuparra is concerned with prominent figures such as Ronald Reagan, California senator William Knowland, Richard Nixon, and Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, his larger interest is in the principal players in the movement behind these individuals, the causes they espoused, and the movement's role in pivotal electoral contests. Schuparra also provides an assessment of how the struggle between liberals and conservatives - and those caught in the middle - in the Golden State both reflected and influenced the national debate over major governmental policies and social issues, particularly on racial matters.

The World the Sixties Made

The World the Sixties Made
Author: Van Gosse
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781592138463

How can we make sense of the fact that after decades of right-wing political mobilizing the major social changes wrought by the Sixties are more than ever part of American life? "The World the Sixties Made, "the first academic collection to treat the last quarter of the twentieth century as a distinct period of U.S. history, rebuts popular accounts that emphasize a conservative ascendancy. The essays in this volume survey a vast historical terrain to tease out the meaning of the not-so-long ago. They trace the ways in which recent U.S. culture and politics continue to be shaped by the legacy of the New Left's social movements, from feminism to gay liberation to black power. Together these essays demonstrate that the America that emerged in the 1970s was a nation profoundly, even radically democratized.

Hollywood's America

Hollywood's America
Author: Steven Mintz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2010-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1405190035

Fully revised, updated, and extended, this compilation of interpretive essays and primary documents teaches students to read films as cultural artifacts within the contexts of actual past events. A new edition of this classic textbook, which ties movies into the broader narrative of US and film history Ten new articles which consider recently released films, as well as issues of gender and ethnicity Well-organized within a chronological framework with thematic treatments to provide a valuable resource for students of the history of American film Fourth edition includes completely new images throughout