Miguel Contreras Labor Program
Living New Deal Project
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Enter the Living New Deal Project Web Site |
About the Living New Deal Project
The Living New Deal Project is supported by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. IRLE’s California Studies Center and the IRLE Library are the sponsoring programs. The California Studies Center, chaired by Professor Richard A. Walker, coordinates all worked associated with volunteers, outreach and data collection; the IRLE Library oversees the technical administration of the Project’s Web site.
New life for the New Deal
Project History and Development
Geographer and writer Gray Brechin and photographer Robert Dawson began the Project in the fall of 2003 under the auspices of the California Historical Society (CHS) with a seed grant from the Columbia Foundation. They soon discovered that the New Deal legacy is so vast and poorly documented that it required others to help harvest information not neatly contained in federal archives. Since then, the Project has grown in numbers and ambition and, in 2007, the Institute for Research in Labor and Employment (IRLE) library and the California Studies Center at U.C. Berkeley partnered to host the project website.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933. The epochal Hundred Days of activist legislation which followed not only fought the terror and desperation engendered by the Great Depression but began to weave the social safety net and physical infrastructure that Americans have come to take for granted. The Living New Deal Project will expand throughout the 75th anniversary year of 2008 and beyond; it will include:
- A searchable online database will enable visitors to discover what the New Deal did for their communities and serve as an electronic guidebook to projects throughout California.
- A website hosted by the IRLE Library will explain the Project and serve as an internet-based resource for New Deal studies.
- A digital map on the website will show spatially the extent and variety of New Deal projects and will grow as projects are identified.
- A book illustrated with archival and contemporary photographs encapsulating the findings of the Project.
- A traveling museum exhibition will feature historic and contemporary photographs.
- Officially declared New Deal Days that will honor veterans and alert the public to our indebtedness to what they did.
- Oral histories will be collected from those who participated in New Deal projects.
Illustrated lectures on the Project tailored to New Deal sites in the communities where they are delivered.
- Lectures at professional meetings explaining the technical aspects of the Project so that it can be replicated elsewhere.
- Articles in magazines and newspapers that will solicit information on New Deal sites.
- Public programs including lectures, tours, and specially designed forums will enable scholars to discuss the New Deal's goals and legacy with audiences and to elicit the memories of New Deal veterans.
Project Sponsors and Partners:
The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, UC Berkeley
- California Studies Center
- The IRLE Library
The California Historical Society
Financial Supporters:
The Columbia Foundation
The LEF Foundation
Private contributors
