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This book is built on a particularly local archival base, including the University Archives, the North Carolina Collection, and the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina. Although it draws additionally on records at the National Archives and the Library of Congress, The Federal Theatre Project in the American South represents a valuable addition to the scholarship on the Great Depression, New Deal, the Little Theatre Movement, and government arts policy history especially because of its tightly delimited geographic setting. As such, and by virtue of North Carolina's distinct relations with the Federal Theatre Project, Cecelia Moore's book occasionally transcends the limits of the local case study. Moore focuses on the years 1935–1939, the short life-span of the Federal Theatre Project, and explores its fragile existence and early demise. “Republicans tagged it as a waste of money,” she writes, “while southern Democrats successfully labeled it a subversive venue for propaganda. The effort, with North Carolina politicians in the leadership, marked one of the first successes for a political coalition that represented a massive backlash to the relative liberalism of the New Deal era” (p. 5). This narrative, then, about the delicate equilibrium between progressive impulses and entrenched reaction, is not an unfamiliar story line during the 1930s, of course. The book takes on interesting contours in North Carolina because of its implications for the history of dramatic literature and performance in addition to the more well-known battles for workers' rights and racial equality. The project's wide success and popularity across the state—Moore devotes two central chapters to the vibrant theater scene in Raleigh (including valuable work on African American drama and interracial collaborations) and a production of The Lost Colony (1937) in Manteo, near the site of the ill-fated English settlement of Roanoke Island in the 1580s—constitutes a sort of ironic parallel to the ongoing political struggle over the project's future. Also ironic is the truncated support for writers and performers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Betty Smith, and others, who fulfilled many of the project's possibilities in North Carolina even as the project's demise was being engineered by the state's political establishment.
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