Documenting Kansas, a Work in Progress

This online exhibit by Dr. Lorraine Madway at Wichita State University shows Kansas during the Depression, the only decade in Kansas history when the state population declined. The photos by FSA photographers show the scorched earth of the Dust Bowl and government efforts at soil reclamation, as well as tight-rope performers that Russell Lee noticed at the 4-H club fair in Cimarron.

Black History Month and the Writers' Project

This marks the start of Black History Month, and also the month in 1941 when Richard Wright published 12 Million Black Voices, his photo essay on black life and history. A collaboration with photographers of the Farm Security Administration, the book showed in almost cinematic sweep the journey that African Americans had made from Africa through slavery to the 20th century.
    As novelist David Bradley says in his interview for Soul of a People: Writing America's Story, Wright pored over the FSA photographs, armed with the history he had gathered, and found inspiration: "So he's looking at these pictures, and he's seeing himself. He's seeing his own experience, he's seeing alter egos, he's seeing where he might have ended up..."
    For Black History Month, Smithsonian Networks will rebroadcast the film, starting February 2.