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WPA Federal Writers' Project
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a federal government project in the United States created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression. It was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. It was one of a group of New Deal arts programs known collectively as Federal Project Number One or Federal One. The FWP employed thousands of people and produced hundreds of publications, including state guides, city guides, local histories, oral histories, ethnographies, and children's books. In addition to writers, the project provided jobs to unemployed librarians, clerks, researchers, editors, and historians. Background Funded under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, the FWP was established July 27, 1935, by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Henry Alsberg, a journalist, playwright, theatrical producer, and human-rights activist, directed the program from 1935 to 1939. In 1939, Alsberg was fired, federal funding was cut, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Alsberg
Henry Garfield Alsberg (September 21, 1881November 1, 1970) was an American journalist and writer who served as the founding director of the Federal Writers' Project. A lawyer by training, he was a foreign correspondent during the Russian Revolution, secretary to the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and an influential volunteer for refugee aid efforts. Alsberg was a producer at the Provincetown Playhouse. He spent years traveling through war-torn Europe on behalf of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. After publishing several magazines for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, he was appointed to head the Federal Writers' Project. Fired from the project shortly after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he worked for a short time for the Office of War Information, then joined Hastings House Publishers as an editor. Early life and education Alsberg was born September 21, 1881, in Manhattan to Meinhard and Bertha Alsberg. Meinha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colson Whitehead
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead (born November 6, 1969) is an American novelist. He is the author of eight novels, including his 1999 debut work '' The Intuitionist''; '' The Underground Railroad'' (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020 for '' The Nickel Boys''. He has also published two books of non-fiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Genius Grant. Life Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead was born in New York City on November 6, 1969, and grew up in Manhattan. He is one of four children of successful entrepreneur parents who owned an executive recruiting firm. As a child in Manhattan, Whitehead went by his first name Arch. He later switched to Chipp, before switching to Colson. He attended Trinity School in Manhattan and graduated from Harvard University in 1991. In college, he became friends with poet Kevin Young. Early in his career, Whitehead lived in Fort Gr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Montana State University Archives And Special Collections
The Montana State University Archives and Special Collections, also known as the Merrill G. Burlingame Archives and Special Collections, is located in Bozeman, Montana. The archives is on the second floor of the Renne Library on the Montana State University-Bozeman campus and consists of materials relating to the history of the American West, trout and salmonids, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and other topics. About The Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections is located in the Montana State University Library in Bozeman, Montana. Merrill G. Burlingame and Minnie Paugh were instrumental to the creation and development of the archive, establishing a solid foundation of research and collection of regionally important materials. Minnie Paugh (1919–2003) was a reference librarian and instructor at Montana State College (now Montana State University), where she helped establish the university's Archives and Special Collections. She was a prolific researcher and writer, contri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
America Eats
America Eats was a project under the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) during the 1930s in the United States. The FWP was one of the many projects contained within the Works Progress Administration, which was a New Deal program created during the Great Depression. America Eats was created in the late 1930s with the intention of producing a book regarding regional foodways. The project was divided into five regions: the Northeast, the South, the Middle West, the Far West and the Southwest. Each region had a team of writers producing short essays discussing the foods and collecting interviews particular to a state. The America Eats project was the brainchild of the FWP's main editor, Katherine Kellock. Her goal was to highlight the "ethnic traditions, as well as the regional and local customs" of foodways in the United States. As a result of Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II, funding for the project was pulled and funneled into the war effort. Subsequently, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Yerby
Frank Garvin Yerby ( – ) was an American writer, best known for his 1946 historical novel ''The Foxes of Harrow''. Early life Yerby was born in Augusta, Georgia, on September 5, 1916, the second of four children of Rufus Garvin Yerby (1886–1961), a hotel doorman, and Wilhelmina Ethel Yerby (née Smythe) (1888–1960), a teacher. Yerby's ancestry was Black, White, and Native American. Yerby would later refer to himself as "a young man whose list of ancestors read like a mini-United Nations." One of Yerby's siblings was Alonzo Yerby, Associate Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and New York City Hospitals Commissioner. As a child, Yerby attended Augusta's Haines Institute, a private school for African Americans founded by Lucy Laney, from which he graduated in 1933. In 1937, he graduated from Paine College with a B.A. in English, and earned his M.A. in Dramatic Arts from Fisk University in 1938. In 1938, he began courses for a doctorate in English at th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Katherine Dunham
Katherine Mary Dunham (June 22, 1909 – May 21, 2006) was an American dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers of the 20th century, and directed her own dance company for many years. She has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance."Joyce Aschenbenner, ''Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). While a student at the University of Chicago, Dunham also performed as a dancer, ran a dance school, and earned an early bachelor's degree in anthropology. Receiving a post graduate academic fellowship, she went to the Caribbean to study the African diaspora, ethnography and local dance. She returned to graduate school and submitted a master's thesis to the anthropology faculty. She did not complete the other requirements for that degree, however, as she realized that her professional calling was performance and choreography. At the height of her career in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Margaret Walker
Margaret Walker (Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander by marriage; July 7, 1915 – November 30, 1998) was an American poet and writer. She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. Her notable works include ''For My People'' (1942) which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and the novel ''Jubilee'' (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War. Biography Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to Sigismund C. Walker, a minister, and Marion (née Dozier) Walker, who helped their daughter by teaching her philosophy and poetry as a child. Her family moved to New Orleans when Walker was a young girl. At the age of 15, she showed a few of her poems to Langston Hughes, on a speaking tour at the moment, who recognized her talent. She attended school there, including several years of college, before she moved north to Chicago. In 1935, Walker received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Northwestern Uni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Wright (author)
Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960) was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries suffering discrimination and violence. Literary critics believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century. It was revealed in 2022 when documents on the JFK assassination were released, that Wright was killed by the CIA after “finishing a manuscript on use of American blacks by the government.” Early life and education Childhood in the South Richard Wright's memoir, ''Black Boy,'' covers the interval in his life from 1912 until May 1936. Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908 at Rucker's Plantation, between the train town of Roxie and the larger river city of Natchez, Mississippi. He was the son of Nathan Wright (c. 1880–c. 1940) w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after ''The New Negro'', a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north. Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood, many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the movement, which spanned from about 1918 until ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arna Bontemps
Arna Wendell Bontemps ( ) (October 13, 1902 – June 4, 1973) was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family. His ancestors included free people of color and French colonists. His father was a contractor and sometimes would take his son to construction sites. As the boy got older, his father would take him along to speak-easies at night that featured jazz. His mother, Maria Carolina Pembroke, was a schoolteacher. Robert E. Fleming"Bontemps, Arna Wendell" ''American National Biography Online'', February 2000. Retrieved June 3, 2007. The family was Catholic, and Bontemps was baptized at St. Francis Xavier Cathedral. They would later become Seventh-day Adventists. When Bontemps was three years old, his family moved to Los Angeles, California, in the Great Migration of blacks out of the South and into cities of the North, Midwest and West. They settled i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name = United States , subdivision_type1 = State , subdivision_type2 = Counties , subdivision_name1 = Illinois , subdivision_name2 = Cook and DuPage , established_title = Settled , established_date = , established_title2 = Incorporated (city) , established_date2 = , founder = Jean Baptiste Point du Sable , government_type = Mayor–council , governing_body = Chicago City Council , leader_title = Mayor , leader_name = Lori Lightfoot ( D) , leader_title1 = City Clerk , leader_name1 = Anna Valencia ( D) , unit_pref = Imperial , area_footnotes = , area_tot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
May Swenson
Anna Thilda May "May" Swenson (May 28, 1913 – December 4, 1989) was an American poet and playwright. Harold Bloom considered her one of the most important and original poets of the 20th century. The first child of Margaret and Dan Arthur Swenson, she grew up as the eldest of 10 children in a Mormon household where Swedish was spoken regularly and English was a second language. Although her conservative family struggled to accept the fact that she was a lesbian, they remained close throughout her life. Much of her later poetry works were devoted to children (e.g. the collection ''Iconographs'', 1970). She also translated the work of contemporary Swedish poets, including the selected poems of Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer. Personal life Swenson attended Utah State University in Logan, Utah, graduating in the class of 1934 with a bachelor's degree. She taught poetry as poet-in-residence at Bryn Mawr College, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the Universit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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