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Christine Bold
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The WPA Guides: Mapping America Paperback – November 1, 1999

by Christine Bold (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars 2 ratings
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In 1935 the FDR administration put 40,000 unemployed artists to work in four federal arts projects. The main contribution of one unit, the Federal Writers Project, was the American Guide Series, a collectively composed set of guidebooks to every state, most regions, and many cities, towns, and villages across the United States.

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. Christine Bold is director of the Centre for Cultural Studies and an associate professor of English at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario.

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  1. Print length
    246 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    University Press of Mississippi
  4. Publication date
    November 1, 1999
  5. Dimensions
    5.8 x 0.71 x 8.92 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1578061954
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1578061952
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Book Description

An argument for how the WPA Guides contrived and shaped America?s conception of itself in the 1930s and ?40s

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An argument for how the WPA Guides contrived and shaped America's conception of itself in the 1930s and '40s

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University Press of Mississippi; Illustrated edition (November 1, 1999)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 246 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1578061954
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1578061952
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.8 x 0.71 x 8.92 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 out of 5 stars 2 ratings

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Christine Bold

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Bomojaz
    3.0 out of 5 stars So-so look at a great American enterprise
    Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2005
    The American Guides to the 48 states, select cities, and other geographical/historical places published by the government in the late 1930s-early 1940s were many things to many people: New Deal Progressive ideology, state boosterism, national unity, etc. Bold looks at five guidebooks and finds the following in four of them:

    Idaho: the first book, edited and totally controlled by Vardis Fisher, offering a "frontier man's" view of the state and among the best of the guidebooks published;

    New York City: an ideological battleground between left and right that came to celebrate economic and cultural diversity;

    North Carolina: filled with local color and racial prejudice, the "haves vs. the have-nots";

    Missouri: where local color was bleached out by the heads in Washington when the book was taken out of the hands of local writers; result: a bland, flavorless guide.

    Many of Bold's points are based solely on the illustrations in the guides. She also says nothing about the other guides, so the title of the book is somewhat misleading: there is a lot more about the guides left out than discussed. She writes in a pedestrian, academic style, too, which is not appealing. I expected more from this book and was generally disappointed.
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