Cultural & Heritage Commission


	Offices:

Text Box: Got Work? is the first comprehensive look at the Great Depression in New Jersey. This timely topic is told through images, photographs, posters and artifacts that explain the social conditions of the 1930s. Relief to people in New Jersey, and indeed throughout the country, came in the form of dozens of federal programs that created jobs and taught new skills. Got Work? the story of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and The New Deal in New Jersey evolves through 7 rooms of the Cornelius Low House. Stories and oral histories tell conditions that were experienced by your great-grandparents and grandparents – these are stories that are often told around the family table . . . they are your family narratives. Museum kiosks allow you to hear the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he announced the “bank holiday” in order to prevent a fiscal collapse. Listen to the voice of a former enslaved person, quite elderly at the time of the 1930s interview, who was recorded by the fieldworkers in the Federal Writers’ Project. That program put authors and writers to work - and they produced travel guides for each state, plays, and oral histories that were called the “slave narratives” (not language we would use today). The Writers Project also documented histories of New Jersey immigrants – and we share all of this with you.

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The Middlesex County Cultural and Heritage Commission is funded in part by the
New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts
New Jersey Historical Commission, a Division of Cultural Affairs in the Department of State

Middlesex County Cultural & Heritage Commission 703 Jersey Ave New Brunswick, NJ 08901-3605
(732) 745 4489 FAX (732) 745 4524 Email culturalandheritage@co.middlesex.nj.us TTY users only call (732) 745 3888