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The Works Progress Administration, or WPA, was an agency of the United States government created as part of the New Deal during the Great Depression. The WPA provided jobs for the unemployed while simultaneously improving public infrastructure; it had a focus on building roads, public schools, libraries, parks, housing, and airports. It also encompassed many humanities and artistic programs, including the Historical Records Survey (which interviewed former enslaved persons) and the Library Services Project, which established 2300 new library buildings and 53 traveling libraries, including the Kentucky Pack Horse library project.
WPA Quotes in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
The The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek quotes below are all either spoken by WPA or refer to WPA. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 10
Quotes
The Companion was a popular request. Mountain women were snatching up new cures and remedies from the magazine, abandoning their old ways of healing.
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“Be obliged to git one. Nester Rylie’s been reading it and she told me in passing last year, she ain’t rubbed groundhog brains on her babies’ sore teeth or needed to use the hen innards on the gums of her teething ones since. And after she’d read about a good paste recipe that cured thrush, Nester said, none of her nine youn’uns ain’t ever had to drink water from a stranger’s shoe again to get the healing.”
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Chapter 21
Quotes
Winnie clasped her hands. “If only we could get more outreach programs up here. If only they could send a block of cheese with every book, a loaf of bread.” She tilted her head to the sky as if telling it to God.
I wished it too. Their hunger for books could teach them of a better life free of the hunger, but without food they’d never live long enough to have the strength to find it.
“Just one damn block of cheese,” Winnie scratched out in a whisper.
I thought of the cheese Doc promised. If I could bargain with him for more food, I could give it to the schoolchildren.
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WPA Term Timeline in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
The timeline below shows where the term WPA appears in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
The Pack Horse Library project is an initiative of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), bringing literature and art into the lives of rural Kentuckians through books. Before she got...
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Chapter 12
...drop on Cussy Mary’s Wednesday route is Hogtail Mountain, where she climbs up to a WPA fire watchtower to deliver books to R.C. Cole. He’s trying to use his learning from...
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Chapter 23
...her to marry anyone in the “We Poke Along” program, as some people call the WPA. Cussy knows that there are many local men too proud to accept “charity” to erect...
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Chapter 34
...dismissed when the superintendent came by for his annual meeting. He brought news that the WPA is building a new stone school and that Winnie’s husband is going to bring her...
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Chapter 43
...married, since the mine is about to shut down. He rejects Cussy’s suggestion of a WPA job, since he feels that it’s undignified to “beg for scraps” and to have to...
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Chapter 44
...doesn’t want her to; she’s too important to the community to stop working. Besides, the WPA has started making exceptions for married women. Jackson confirmed this by reading the paperwork himself,...
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