New Deal Art Now offers a sampling of the breadth of the Works Progress Administration and Federal Art Projects (WPA/FAP), calling attention to the skills, histories, and social identities of an extraordinarily diverse spectrum of professional and amateur artists funded by the United States federal government during the Great Depression. The New Deal, a major economic stimulus initiative that ran from 1935-1943, included the Works Progress Administration Federal One Projects, encompassing fine art, music, theater, writing, and design. These projects provided economic support and cultural enrichment to hundreds of thousands of Americans, in the form of jobs, entertainment, and education in the arts. New Deal Art Now seeks to reframe a period of United States artistic production that is often narrowly cast in exhibitions and their related literature on the subject. The theme of diversity is explored through several critical lenses, such as questioning the relationship between art and artifact, considering that many creative works of the New Deal function as both. The majority of the exhibited artworks are juxtaposed against one another to challenge the designations that contemporary material culture traditionally assigns them. Showcasing 48 objects in total, the exhibits include painting, sculpture, educational models, archival film, and archival audio, which are juxtaposed alongside contemporary paintings, photography, and music, created in conjunction with this exhibition. By situating these works (as well as the very categories of amateur and professional, art and artifact, museum and archive, past and present) in productive relation to one another this exhibition argues for the significance of all of these works and artists to the diverse history of twentieth-century American art.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the Agricultural Adjustment Wheat Reduction Program functioned in North Dakota from May of 1933 to January of 1936, why it ran so smoothly, and why it was such a success within the state. By using county Extension Agent reports that date from the time period this thesis uses an extensive number of primary sources that have not been used before. These reports, along with farmer journal accounts, newspaper articles, and Agricultural Adjustment Administration reports show that North Dakota wheat farmers openly embraced the policies of the Wheat Reduction Program and participated in it in higher numbers than any other state in the nation. The farmers embraced the program because the drought and economic depression they were facing left let them little choice, but also because the program did not seek to radically alter the structure of wheat farming in North Dakota.

This dissertation examines the long term effects of population control initiatives brought to the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico to reveal the connections between insular reform programs and the constraints placed on reproductive autonomy for Puerto Rican women in a colonial setting. The history of these interventions exposes how various interest groups including mainland reformers, the Catholic Church, Puerto Rican nationalists and socialists, and colonial intermediaries obscured the damage done to Puerto Rico through poor colonial management during the first thirty years of U.S. occupation by shifting the blame for Puerto Rico’s problems to the supposedly dangerous reproductive habits of poor and working class Puerto Rican women. In all cases, overpopulation discourse and the production of knowledge claims regarding Puerto Rican sexuality, reproduction, population control as a tool of modernization contributed heavily to these pressure groups’ appeals to legitimacy of rule over the island throughout the century. In less than fifty years the conflation of birth control practices, eugenic ideology, and population control legislation would transform Puerto Rico into a social science/contraceptive laboratory, having such a profound impact on the trajectory of birth control culture that a 1981 fertility survey showed that over one third (39%) of the island’s women were sterile. By analyzing the production of this distorted representation of insular conditions and reproduction trends in Puerto Rico during this early phase of U.S. control over the island, this dissertation explores how the convergence of modernizing reform initiatives, population control policy, social science, and overpopulation discourse contributed to the colonial domination of Puerto Rican women’s reproductive autonomy and transformed their into sites of colonial encounters despite living in a nation which denies its own colonial status and history.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis examines how Naval Air Station (NAS) Sanford impacted the nearby city economically, demographically, and socially during World War II. City commission minutes, newspapers, and census data highlight the efforts of city leaders and their cooperation with the federal government to get a naval base established at Sanford. Thereafter, it assesses the ways in which a naval base garnered economic and demographic development, and organizing among African Americans in a southern city.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Neil Foley. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI company.

"The purpose of this study will be to picture the three-fold aspect of the C.C.C. educational program. This will be done in five chapters. This, the first chapter, will describe the conditions leading up to the creation of the C.C.C. It will show how education became the prime motivation of the whole C.C.C. and it will show how the permanency of the C.C.C. depends on the type of education that is evolved. Then, chapters two, three and four will analyze the three phases of C.C.C. education. These chapters will be concerned with (1) leisure time activities, (2) vocational education, and (3) academic education. The final chapter will deal with the social and economic results of the three-fold educational program in the C.C.C. Through the entire study there will be a definite attempt to establish certain results and to evaluate them according to the gains that have been made in C.C.C. education since the beginning in 1933."-- leaves 1-2.

James Evetts Haley, a West Texas rancher and historian, balked at the liberalism promoted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Haley grew concerned about increased federal control over states and believed Roosevelt was leading the country toward bankruptcy. In 1936, Haley, a life-long Democrat, led the Jeffersonian Democrats in Texas, who worked to defeat Roosevelt and supported the Republican candidate, Alf Landon. He continued to lead a small faction of anti-New Deal Texans in various movements through the 1960s. Haley espoused and defended certain conservative principles over the course of his life and the development of these ideas created the philosophical base of the modern Republican Party in Texas.

À partir des années 1890, la construction de l’identité nationale américaine et d’un citoyen moderne mobilise différentes définitions de la notion de folk music, issues de différents milieux intellectuels et fondées sur une multiplication des collectes, pour culminer à la fin du New Deal en l’établissement d’un consensus sur l’existence et le contenu de base de l'American Folk Music. Compositeurs et musicologues construisent l’American Folk Music pour tenter de fonder une école de composition américaine qui rivaliserait avec les écoles européennes. Les folkloristes universitaires l’abordent en tant qu’objet d’étude, selon une approche textualiste et donc nécessairement anglo-centrée. Des anthropologues se saisissent aussi de cette notion pour l'appliquer aux musiques amérindiennes, puis à celles des Noirs-Américains. Avec les psychologues, ils y introduisent les influences des approches évolutionniste, diffusionniste, fonctionnaliste et relativiste. Éducateurs progressistes et travailleurs sociaux l’emploieront dans des projets d’ingénierie sociale, notamment en relation avec le mouvement d'américanisation. Tous ces paradigmes coexistent et s’opposent ou s’influencent jusque dans les années 1930, moment où l’institutionnalisation de l’American Folk Music au sein de l’État fédéral conduit à une rencontre et une forme de synthèse de toutes ces approches. Cette thèse explore les travaux des inventeurs de l’American Folk Music autour du parcours d’une des collectrices qui établissent la synthèse new-dealienne, Sidney Robertson. / From the 1890's on, the construction of American national identity and of the modern citizen draws on various definitions of the notion of folk music, produced by various intellectual circles and supported by the development of field collecting, to result towards the end of the New Deal Era in a tentative consensus on the basic content and the very existence of American Folk Music. Composers and musicologists address American Folk Music as a tool to try and set up an American composition school to rival the european ones. Academic folklorists approach it as a scholarly object through a text-centered paradigm requiring its linguistic anglo-centeredness. Anthropologists apply the notion to Amerindian, then later on Black-American musics. Along with the psychologists, they introduce in its definition the new concepts and bias of the competing evolutionist, diffusionist, functionalist and relativist theoretical schools. Progressive educators and social workers use it in their social engineering programs, most importantly in the Americanization-related ones.These various paradigms coexist, compete, and influence each other until the 1930's, when the institutionalization of American Folk Music inside Federal State agencies encourages a synthesis of these different approaches. The present thesis aims to describe the works and ideas of these various contributors to the invention of the American Folk Music through the study of the life and career of one of the New Deal collectors instrumental in this synthesis, Sidney Robertson.