The banner for this blog suggests the wonder with which Americans approached their travels. It is a portion of Grand Canyon National Park, A Free Government Service (ca. 1938), a publicity poster created by an unknown artist employed by the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, during the Great Depression. The Library of Congress features 908 of these posters in its web exhibition By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943. This painting updated a century-old tradition of using art to shape how Americans viewed the western frontier.
About Mark Souther
I am an associate professor of history at Cleveland State University and public history director of the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities. I'm the author of New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City, editor of American Tourism: Constructing a National Tradition (forthcoming), and am researching a new book on perceptions of decline in postwar Cleveland. Apart from my involvement in CPHDH, I authored a recent successful National Register of Historic Places nomination and serve on the Cleveland Heights Landmark Commission. My history interests include urban and suburban history, 20th-century U.S. political and cultural history, leisure and tourism, and architecture and historic preservation, not to mention that I'm a self-indulgent hunter-gatherer of antiques and ephemera.
