The WPA guides : mapping America / Christine Bold.

Main entry:

Bold, Christine, 1955-

Title & Author:

The WPA guides : mapping America / Christine Bold.

Publication:

Description:

xvi, 246 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (225-236) and index.
1. The Cultural Work of Guidebooks -- 2. The Federal Writers' Project -- 3. Idaho: Vardis Fisher, Local Hero -- 4. Katharine Kellock's Highway Route Series: The View from the Road -- 5. New York City: The View from Rockefeller Center versus the View from the Sidewalk -- 6. North Carolina: Local Knowledge, Local Color -- 7. Missouri: Recovering Voices of Dissent -- Conclusion: The Afterlife of the Guidebooks.

Summary:

The WPA arts projects were poised on the cusp of the modern bureaucratization of culture. They occurred at a moment when the federal government was extending its reach into citizens' daily lives. The 400 guidebooks the teams produced have been widely celebrated as icons of American democracy and diversity. Clumped together, they manifest a lofty role for the project and a heavy responsibility for its teams of writers. The guides assumed the authority of conceptualizing the national identity.
In The WPA Guides: Mapping America, Christine Bold closely examines this publicized view of the guides and reveals its flaws. Her research in archival materials reveals the negotiations and conflicts between the central editors in Washington and the local people in the states. Race, region, and gender are taken as important categories within which difference and conflict appear. She 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 faultlines of the project gaped open. Spotlighting the controversies between federal and state bureaucracies, Bold concludes that the image of America that the WPA fostered is closer to fabrication than to actuality.

Resources:
Additional Information at Google Books

ISBN:

1578061946 (alk. paper)
9781578061945 (alk. paper)
1578061954 (pbk. ; alk. paper)
9781578061952 (pbk. ; alk. paper)

Subject:

Federal Writers' Project History.
Federal Writers' Project
American guide series.
United States Guidebooks.
United States

Form/genre:

Guidebooks.
travel guidebooks.
History
Books.
Guides touristiques.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 207474
Call No.: E175.4 .B6 1999
Status: Available

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