Funded Projects Query Form
One match

This project, a book based on my dissertation research, explores the highly explicit decision by proponents of the New Deal to assert continuity between the established history of federal disaster relief and the New Deal's relief and social security programs. I first recover the history of federal aid to disaster sufferers from the the early Republic to the 1930s, and then show how this history was recruited by New Dealers as a precedent for the expansion of the state during the 1930s in Congress, the Supreme Court, and in the polity. I show how the decision to use the history of disaster aid to justify relief for the Depression decisively shaped the New Deal and influenced the subsequent history of the American state.