The Living New Deal is attracting more eyes than ever. In November we were featured on the PBS Newshour, which boosted our website to a record 4 million views last year. According to web analytics company, Cloudfare, this puts us in the top twenty-five percent of all the websites they follow. The biggest attractions to our website are our national online map and New Deal program summaries, which are heavily used by history teachers and students. We expect another big bump in traffic to our site once our rebuild is complete. Webmaster Lisa Thompson and her team have been working furiously over the last two years to make the website more secure, user friendly, and beautiful. We’re tying up hundreds of loose ends, but expect to roll out the new site in a matter of weeks.
NEW STAFF AND A NEW INITIATIVE
Mary Okin joined the team as Assistant Director both to bolster our administrative capacity and to launch a new program, Advocating for New Deal Art and Architecture. Mary holds a doctorate in Art History from UC Santa Barbara. She taught at San Jose State and served as a researcher at UC Berkeley. She brings expertise and energy to our team and is off and running contacting museums, archives and New Deal art experts around the country. Mary lives in Sunnyvale, California.
Arlene Geiger recently joined us as Director of Living New Deal's New York City Chapter, replacing Peggy Crane. A native New Yorker, Arlene is a retired adjunct professor of Economics at John Jay College (CUNY) and a longtime political organizer. She brings deep knowledge of the city, valuable connections and new ideas. She was the unanimous choice of the Chapter's working group.
We also welcomed Natalie McDonald to our team to locate and document New Deal sites in Los Angeles for the latest in our series of maps and guides to the New Deal. Natalie is a graduate student in history at Cal State University-Northridge. She has already discovered many new sites for our expanding online map and database of New Deal sites, while spiffing up past entries.
TEACHING ABOUT THE NEW DEAL
The biggest group of users of the Living New Deal's online resources are students and teachers. The demand for such teaching materials is strong. Many American History teachers have reached out to us with requests and suggestions. Thus far, we have lacked the capacity to develop full-on teaching curricula, but have made significant progress thanks to the leadership of Development Director Kurt Feichtmeir. Kurt secured a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to work with the Washington DC school district, which requires all seniors to take a course on local history. The grant made possible an Educator's Guide to accompany the Living New Deal’s online map to the New Deal Washington DC. We hope to do something similar with the New York City and Los Angeles school systems, making use of our maps to those cities to teach about the importance of the New Deal in U.S. history.
We’ve also reworked several bibliographies on our website, segmenting them by subject areas such as housing, infrastructure and art, and provided a dozen introductory reading lists of the ten or so best books on each topic.
LIVING NEW DEAL NATIONWIDE
The Living New Deal has become a truly national organization. Our staff and volunteer National Associates across the country are doing great work bringing the New Deal to life. Our public outreach includes webinars on a wide array of topics, from New Deal art to lessons in modern infrastructure. Locally, we offer in-person talks and events. Last year we hosted a New Deal tour of New York’s Central Park and a guided tour of New Deal art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This outreach work has been led by Communications Director Susan Ives, Project Scholar Gray Brechin and the New York City chapter of the Living New Deal.
Judith Kenny, our volunteer Northwest Coordinator, sought and won a grant from the Kinsman Foundation for research and public education on the New Deal in Oregon. Not only has Judith added more than two hundred Oregon sites to our national map, she and local cinematographers produced “Landscape Harmony,” a beautiful video about the five extraordinary New Deal bridges along the Oregon's coast, with magnificent aerial footage taken from drones. Judith has just been awarded a second Kinsman grant for 2023.
We also call your attention to our On the Road series—photographic and video travel essays about New Deal sites around the country. Our National Associate for Massachusetts, Fern Nesson, retraces some of the routes along the Eastern seaboard, famously laid out in the American Guides series published by the Federal Writers' Project. Fern's superb essays now number over fifty. Our National Associate for Indiana, Glory-June Greiff, who has nominated dozens of New Deal sites to the National Register, writes about her favorite New Deal sites in the Midwest. New contributor Oak McCoy (“Professor Oak”) uses videos to create virtual tours of New Deal works in California state parks
Learn more about the Living New Deal’s activities in 2022 and prior years in our Annual Reports.
Mary Okin joined the team as Assistant Director both to bolster our administrative capacity and to launch a new program, Advocating for New Deal Art and Architecture. Mary holds a doctorate in Art History from UC Santa Barbara. She taught at San Jose State and served as a researcher at UC Berkeley. She brings expertise and energy to our team and is off and running contacting museums, archives and New Deal art experts around the country. Mary lives in Sunnyvale, California.
Arlene Geiger recently joined us as Director of Living New Deal's New York City Chapter, replacing Peggy Crane. A native New Yorker, Arlene is a retired adjunct professor of Economics at John Jay College (CUNY) and a longtime political organizer. She brings deep knowledge of the city, valuable connections and new ideas. She was the unanimous choice of the Chapter's working group.
We also welcomed
