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From 1935-1943, the WPA built many public buildings and roads. Almost every American community has a park, bridge or facility constructed by the WPA. The program promoted literacy training, health and education improvement projects as well as programs for art and music. This collection provides over 5,000 photographs documenting these activities in Louisiana. The Louisiana Writers Project compiled collections of folklore, legends, recipes, local history and interviewed local citizens and former slaves. Transcriptions of newspapers dating to 1815 provide insights into the culture and history of Louisiana. The WPA Collection was placed in the custody of the State Library when the WPA ended early in 1943. It has since remained, more or less in storage, and in large degree inaccessible. Now available to the public, this digitized material provides a unique look into the history and culture of Louisiana.

From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four million slaves. What makes the WPA narratives so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery, revealing the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered. Each narrative taken alone offers a fragmentary, microcosmic representation of slave life. Read together, they offer a sweeping composite view of slavery in North America, allowing us to explore some of the most compelling themes of nineteenth-century slavery, including labor, resistance and flight, family life, relations with masters, and religious belief.

Iowa Works Project Administration Graves Registration Survey