The Rough Guide to Washington DC is the definitive guide to this historic city, with clear maps and detailed coverage of all the city's best attractions. Discover Washington DC's highlights with stunning photography and information on everything from the city's memorials and museums along the Mall to showpieces like the International Spy Museum. Find detailed practical advice on what to see and do in Washington DC, relying on up-to-date descriptions of the best hotels, bars, clubs, shops and restaurants for all budgets; The Rough Guide to Washington DC also includes full-colour sections of the region's top sights, and there are plenty of maps to help you plan your trip to the lively and fascinating capital of the United States. Make the most of your holiday with The Rough Guide to Washington DC.
A comprehensive travel guide to Washington, DC, with maps and information on accommodations and restaurants, shopping and entertainment, and interesting tourist sites.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | Winner of the New Deal Book Award An immersive account of the New Deal project that created state-by-state guidebooks to America, in the midst of the Great Depression—and employed some of the biggest names in American letters The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious—and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of hard-up writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a series of guidebooks to the then forty-eight states—along with hundreds of other publications dedicated to cities, regions, and towns—while also gathering reams of folklore, narratives of formerly enslaved people, and even recipes, all of varying quality, each revealing distinct sensibilities. All this was the singular purview of the Federal Writers’ Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration founded in 1935 to employ jobless writers, from once-bestselling novelists and acclaimed poets to the more dubiously qualified. The FWP took up the lofty goal of rediscovering America in words and soon found itself embroiled in the day’s most heated arguments regarding radical politics, racial inclusion, and the purpose of writing—forcing it to reckon with the promises and failures of both the New Deal and the American experiment itself. Scott Borchert’s Republic of Detours tells the story of this raucous and remarkable undertaking by delving into the experiences of key figures and tracing the FWP from its optimistic early days to its dismemberment by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. We observe notable writers at their day jobs, including Nelson Algren, broke and smarting from the failure of his first novel; Zora Neale Hurston, the most widely published Black woman in the country; and Richard Wright, who arrived in the FWP’s chaotic New York City office on an upward career trajectory courtesy of the WPA. Meanwhile, Ralph Ellison, Studs Terkel, John Cheever, and other future literary stars found encouragement and security on the FWP payroll. By way of these and other stories, Borchert illuminates an essentially noble enterprise that sought to create a broad and inclusive self-portrait of America at a time when the nation’s very identity and future were thrown into question. As the United States enters a new era of economic distress, political strife, and culture-industry turmoil, this book’s lessons are urgent and strong.
In 1935 the FDR administration put 40,000 unemployed artists to work in four federal arts projects. The main contribution of one unit, the Federal Writers Project, was the American Guide Series, a collectively composed set of guidebooks to every state, most regions, and many cities, towns, and villages across the United States. The WPA arts projects were poised on the cusp of the modern bureaucratization of culture. They occurred at a moment when the federal government was extending its reach into citizens' daily lives. The 400 guidebooks the teams produced have been widely celebrated as icons of American democracy and diversity. Clumped together, they manifest a lofty role for the project and a heavy responsibility for its teams of writers. The guides assumed the authority of conceptualizing the national identity. In The WPA Guides: Mapping America Christine Bold closely examines this publicized view of the guides and reveals its flaws. Her research in archival materials reveals the negotiations and conflicts between the central editors in Washington and the local people in the states. Race, region, and gender are taken as important categories within which difference and conflict appear. She looks at the guidebook for each of five distinctively different locations -- Idaho, New York City, North Carolina, Missouri, and U.S. One and the Oregon Trail--to assess the editorial plotting of such issues as gender, race, ethnicity, and class. As regionalists jostled with federal officialdom, the faultlines of the project gaped open. Spotlighting the controversies between federal and state bureaucracies, Bold concludes that the image of America that the WPA fostered is closer to fabrication than to actuality. Christine Bold is director of the Centre for Cultural Studies and an associate professor of English at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario.
This tour guide for time travelers offers New York lovers and 1930s buffs an endlessly fascinating look at life as it was lived in the days when a trolley ride cost five cents, a room at the Plaza was $7.50, and the new World's Fair was the talk of the town. Hailed by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books ever written about the city. Photos. Maps.
This lively and informative guide offers tourists, residents, and architecture aficionados alike insights into more than 400 of Washington, D.C.’s most important landmarks. Organized into 19 discrete tours, this thoroughly redesigned and updated edition includes 45 new entries, encompassing the House of Sweden, the U.S. Institute of Peace, classic buildings that epitomize the city—the White House, the Capitol, Union Station—and a number of private buildings off the beaten path. G. Martin Moeller, Jr., blends informed, concise descriptions with engaging commentary on each landmark, revealing often-surprising details of the buildings' history and design. Every entry is accompanied by a photograph and includes the structure's location, its architects and designers, and the corresponding dates of completion. Each entry is keyed to an easy-to-read map at the beginning of the tour. From the imposing monuments of Capitol Hill and the Mall to the pastoral suburban enclaves of Foxhall and Cleveland Park, from small memorials to vast commercial and institutional complexes, this guide shows us a Washington that is at once excitingly fresh and comfortably familiar.
