Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American writer, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction 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 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. The FWP employed thousands of people and produced hundreds of publications, including state guides, city guides, local histories, oral histories, ethnographies, and children's books. In addition to writers, the project provided jobs to unemployed librarians, clerks, researchers, editors, and historians.
Pantheon Books is an American book publishing imprint with editorial independence. It is part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
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 Non-Fiction.
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, 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.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a 2006 zombie apocalyptic horror novel written by American author Max Brooks. The novel is broken into five chapters: Warnings, Blame, The Great Panic, Turning the Tide, and Good-Byes, and features a collection of individual accounts narrated by an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission, following the devastating global conflict against a zombie plague. Other passages record a decade-long desperate struggle, as experienced by people of various nationalities. The personal accounts take place all over the world, including Antarctica and even outer space. The "interviews" detail the experiences of the survivors of the crisis, as well as social, political, religious, economic, and environmental changes that have occurred as a result.
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.
StoryCorps is an American non-profit organization whose mission is to record, preserve, and share the stories of Americans from all backgrounds and beliefs. 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 is 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 that the podcast's founder and host Eric Marcus conducted for the two editions of his oral history book about the LGBT movement, which he was commissioned to write in the late 1980s. In February 2020, Making Gay History was adapted for the stage at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Edward Balchowsky was an American poet, artist, musician, composer who served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Although he lost a hand, in Spain, Balchowsky became an important figure in the Chicago Arts Scene. Four well-known singer-songwriters wrote songs inspired by Balchowsky, Jimmy Buffett, Loudon Wainwright, Utah Phillips and Dion Dimucci.
Sang Ye is the pen name of Shen Dajun, a Chinese journalist, oral historian, and collector. He is the author of two oral histories, Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China, and China Candid: The People on the People's Republic. Originally trained as an electrical engineer, following a short course at Beijing Normal University in 1978 he began working as a freelance journalist. Described as a "remarkably gifted interviewer" with a "wholly unexpected, free-and-easy style" by Studs Terkel, Sang Ye has been praised for providing a unique perspective on China in the Reform and Opening Up era, "[bringing] to light the way people make sense of the world through telling themselves stories about their personal journeys."
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.
