Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American writer, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1985 for The Good War and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a federal government project in the United States created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers and to develop a history and overview of the United States, by state, cities and other jurisdictions. It was launched in 1935 during the Great Depression. It was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. It was one of a group of New Deal arts programs known collectively as Federal Project Number One or Federal One.
Pantheon Books is an American book publishing imprint. Founded in 1942 as an independent publishing house in New York City by Kurt and Helen Wolff, it specialized in introducing progressive European works to American readers. In 1961, it was acquired by Random House, and André Schiffrin was hired as executive editor, who continued to publish important works, by both European and American writers, until he was forced to resign in 1990 by Random House owner Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr. and president Alberto Vitale. Several editors resigned in protest, and multiple Pantheon authors including Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, and Barbara Ehrenreich held a protest outside Random House. In 1998, Bertelsmann purchased Random House, and the imprint has undergone a number of corporate restructurings since then. It is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group under Penguin Random House.
Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts and Letters and Chair of the Department of History at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and the author of eight books and the editor of three. He is considered one of the world's leading historians of the Great Depression. McElvaine is also known for his work on the centrality of misperceptions of differences and inequality between the sexes in the unfolding of human history.
"The Good War": An Oral History of World War II (1984) is an oral history of World War II compiled by Studs Terkel. The work received the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
John Beecher was an activist poet, writer, and journalist who wrote about the Southern United States during the Great Depression and the American Civil Rights Movement. Beecher was active in the American labor and civil rights movements. During the McCarthy era, Beecher lost his teaching job for refusing to sign a state loyalty oath. Following a 1967 decision of the California Supreme Court that disallowed such a loyalty oath, he was reinstated in 1977. Beecher's books include Report to the Stockholders, To Live and Die in Dixie, and In Egypt Land.
In the United States, the Great Depression began with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and then spread worldwide. The nadir came in 1931–1933, and recovery came in 1940. The stock market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, famine, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth as well as for personal advancement. Altogether, there was a general loss of confidence in the economic future.
Clifford Judkins Durr was an Alabama lawyer who played an important role in defending activists and others accused of disloyalty during the New Deal and McCarthy eras. He also was the lawyer who represented Rosa Parks in her challenge to the constitutionality of the ordinance, due to the infamous segregation of passengers on buses in Montgomery. This is what launched the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott.
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a 1974 nonfiction book by the oral historian and radio broadcaster Studs Terkel.
The American Clock is a play by Arthur Miller. The play is about 1930s America during The Great Depression. It is based in part on Studs Terkel's Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression.
Robert Gover was an American journalist who became a best-selling novelist at age 30. His first novel, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, a satire on American racism, remains a cult classic that helped break down America's fear of four-letter words and sexually explicit scenes, as well as sensitizing Americans to sanctimonious hypocrisy. Gover worked with writers for three decades. On the Run with Dick and Jane was his ninth novel. His previous book, Time and Money, explores economic and planetary cyclical correlations. In 2015, the Eric Hoffer Prose Award was renamed the Gover Story Prize in his honor.
Tony Parker was an oral historian whose work was dedicated to giving a voice to British and American society's most marginalised figures, from single mothers to lighthouse keepers to criminals, including murderers.
Gholām-Hossein Sā'edi MD was a prolific Iranian writer.
StoryCorps is an American non-profit organization which aims to record, preserve, and share the stories of Americans from all backgrounds and beliefs. Its mission statement is "to help us believe in each other by illuminating the humanity and possibility in us all—one story at a time". StoryCorps grew out of Sound Portraits Productions as a project founded in 2003 by radio producer David Isay. Its headquarters are located in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
The Studs Terkel Radio Archive is an archive of over 1,000 digitized audio tapes originally aired over 45 years on Studs Terkel's radio show on WFMT-FM or used in his oral history collections in the books Division Street America (1967) and Working (1974). Terkel donated a total of 5,600 tapes to the Chicago History Museum, which contracted the WFMT Radio network, to publish the recordings online. The bulk of the tapes are digitized, and the archive distributes as many as possible online. The American public radio network NPR featured many of the tapes from the book "Working" during the week of September 25 – October 2, 2016. The Chicago History Museum is also working with the Library of Congress to make the tapes available to visitors to their buildings in Washington, DC.
Making Gay History is an oral history podcast on the subject of LGBT history, featuring trailblazers, activists, and allies. Most episodes draw on the three-decade-old audio archive of rare interviews conducted by the podcast's founder and host Eric Marcus in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Sharon Rudahl is an American comic artist, illustrator and writer. She was one of the first female artists who contributed to the underground comix movement of the early 1970's. In 1972, she was part of the women's collective that founded Wimmen's Comix, the first on-going comic drawn exclusively by women.
Wallace Rasmussen was an American businessman and prominent philanthropist. Hired at Beatrice Foods Company in 1934 as an ice hauler, Rasmussen served as president and then chairman and chief executive officer of the former international food conglomerate, Beatrice, from 1976 until his retirement in 1980. Rasmussen rose to the top of the business with just a high school diploma.
Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr is a 1985 autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr edited by Hollinger F. Barnard and published by the University of Alabama Press. The book's contents were compiled from interviews taped in the mid-1970s by scholars of oral history. It provides a vivid account of the racism and misogyny of the American South in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as being the personal story of Virginia Foster Durr's life, and its text includes language attributed to others that is now considered inappropriate.
