SLSL Intro "The Old Baedeker Trick Again"

[Dave Monroe]

   "Not only did I complicate this Long Island space,
but I also drew a line around the whole neighborhood,
picked it up and shifted it to the Berkshires, where I
still never have been.  The old Baedeker trick again. 
This time I found the details I needed in the regional
guide to the Berkshires put out in the 1930's by the
Federal Writers Project of the WPA.  This is one of an
excellent set of state and regional volumes, which may
still be available in libraries.  They make
instructive and pleasurable reading.  In fact, there
is some stuff in the Berkshire book so good, so rich
in detail and deep in feeling, that even I was ashamed
to steal from it." (SL, "Intro," p. 21)

See ...

Federal Writers' Project.  The Berkshire Hills:
   A WPA Guide.  Boston: Northeastern UP, 1987 [1939].


"may still be available in libraries"

LC Control Number: 86033333  
Type of Material: Book
Brief Description: The Berkshire Hills / compiled and
written by members of the Federal Writers' Project of
the Works Progress Administration for Massachusetts ;
with a new foreword by Roger Bourne Linscott.
1st Northeastern University Press ed.
Boston : Northeastern University Press, 1987, c1939.
xvi, 368 p., [10] p. of plates : ill. ; 21 cm.

CALL NUMBER: F72.B5 B39 1987
Copy 1 
Request in: Jefferson or Adams Bldg General or Area
Studies Reading Rms 

http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=1&hd=1,1&CallBrowse=1&SEQ=20021117230906&PID=11733&SID=3

The Federal Writers' Project materials in the Library
of Congress Manuscript Division are part of a larger
collection titled The U.S. Work Progress
Administration Federal Writers' Project and Historical
Records Survey. The holdings from Federal Writers'
Project span the years 1889-1942 and cover a wide
range of topics and subprojects. Altogether, the
Federal Writers' holdings number approximately 300,000
items and consist of correspondence, memoranda, field
reports, notes, graphs, charts, preliminary and
corrected drafts of essays, oral testimony, folklore,
miscellaneous administrative and miscellaneous other
material. 

Well over one-half of the materials in this record
group pertain to the American Guide, the sobriquet for
the critically acclaimed state guides....

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpafwp.html

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html

There is a complete set of the WPA Federal Writers'
Project American Guide Series in the Main Reading
Room; another complete set is held in the American
History Division, where studies including guidebooks
for the United States, Canada, and Latin American
countries are also kept. Materials in the general
collections are of considerable historical importance
and cover all countries. The holdings are extensive
from the period since the early nineteenth century and
include series such as Baedeker, Appleton, Murray, and
Guide Bleu. United States materials, particularly
those for New York State, are more complete.

http://digilib.nypl.org/dynaweb/williams/williams/
@Generic__BookTextView/24343

http://www.nypl.org/


>From Michael Dittman, "The Federal Writers' Project
and the Creation of Hegemony," 49th Parallel: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies
No. 2 (Spring 1999) ...

"America has a rich, radical literary past.  It has
been effectively erased from popular memory for a
number of reasons, most of them ideological.  The WPA
Guides, which exploited many of the ideas which would
influence literary criticism: the tension between the
spoken and written word, the authority of the written
word as document and the creation or fabrication of
'fact', are a part of that erased literary tradition. 
In addition, the guides are uniquely American in that
they make an appeal to individuality while emphasizing
a common Social Democratic tradition as well as a
Utopian future.  The guides are a valuable key or
entry point to that radical literary history.  The
reclamation of these voices and this literature is an
important and long term project."

http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/49thparallel/backissues/issue2/fedmain.htm

And see as well ...

Bold, Christine.  The WPA: Mapping America.
   Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999.

http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/w/WPA_guides.html

Schindler-Carter, Petra.  Vintage Snapshots:
   The Fabrication of a Nation in the WPA American
   Guide Series.  New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

"Chapter four, 'Un-American Guides and Pink Baedekers:
The Red Scare of the Federal Writers' Project'
investigates the American Guide Series' troubled
relationship with anti-New Deal forces that repeatedly
accused the FWP of being a Communist front
organization which employed reds and fellow travelers
to write leftist propaganda and circulate it in the
nation under government imprint. This chapter
chronicles several remarkable episodes of
red-baiting....  Any references in the guides
indicating sympathy with the troubles of American
labor or ethnic minorities were construed as attempts
to 'array class against class' and to cause a
resurrection.

"I argue in this chapter that the guide books were, in
theory, particularly vulnerable to such attacks
because they offered an apparently prescriptive vision
of the nation. As 'guides' they directed a mode of
perspective and interpretation that these critics
resented...."

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pscarter/fwp4.html

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pscarter/fwp.html

Weisberger, Bernard A.  The WPA Guide to America:
   The Best of 1930s America as Seen by the Federal
   Writers' Project.  New York: Pantheon, 1985.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com