Miami and Dade County; Including Miami Beach and Coral Gables [Planning Your Vacation in Florida]

xx, 202 pages. Illustrations. Maps. Chronology. Bibliography. Index. No dust jacket present. Some cover wear noted. Writing inside both covers. Some page soiling noted. This is one of the American Guide series. The cover title is "Guide to Miami and Environs". Foreword by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. The books in the series were to contain accurate and thorough accounts of American history, according to a letter to State directors on the project. Each book's primary purpose was to not only outline the history of the individual states but the following as well: Geography, Agriculture, Tourist attractions, Ethnic groups, Architecture,Arts, and Industry. Three different types of guides were published: state, regional, and city guides. Each guide had its own distinct features, but followed the same uniform structure. The city guides had the most narrow scope out of all three types, as the focus was on a single location. Because of this, their maps could be in the greatest detail, not only giving an overview of a city's layout, but individual neighborhoods as well. City Guides highlighted points of special interest in greater detail. In the Philadelphia guide, sites such as Carpenters' Hall and Girard College, an-all boys boarding school in the city's northern section, each had several pages dedicated to them. The maps that were included in each book added value to them as material objects and not just literature. With the increasing mobility afforded by the number of Americans who owned automobiles, the guides served as reliable and durable resources for travelers moving throughout the country. The American Guide Series includes books and pamphlets published from 1937 to 1941 under the auspices of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP), a Depression-era program that was part of the larger Works Progress Administration in the United States. The American Guide Series books were compiled by the FWP, but printed by individual states, and contained detailed histories of each of the then 48 states of the Union with descriptions of every major city and town. The series not only detailed the histories of the 48 states, but provided insight to their cultures as well. In total, the project employed over 6,000 writers. The format was uniform, comprising essays on the state's history and culture, descriptions of its major cities, automobile tours of important attractions, and a portfolio of photographs. Many books in the project have been updated by private companies or republished without updating. Although not then a state, a guide for Alaska was published, and also for Puerto Rico (but not for Hawaii). If there had been room in Rocinante I would have packed the W.P.A. Guides to the States, all forty-eight volumes of them.The complete set comprises the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has approached it." John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (1962). As part of the Federal Writers' Project established under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 and the Works Progress Administration, over 6,500 men and women were employed around the country as writers, collecting stories, interviews, and photographs on a variety of subjects. The project attracted many unemployed writers and artists, offering a wage of twenty dollars a week. President Franklin D. Roosevelt enlisted Henry Alsberg, a journalist and playwright to head the project. As part of this, the FWP developed and published a series of books that served as guides to the 48 existing states. Each book's primary purpose was to not only outline the history of the individual state, but its culture and geography as well. Their predecessor, Baedeker's Handbook for Travelers: United States, lacked much of what was needed to give a picture of America during the 1930s. Alsberg insisted that the new series of books paint a picture of American culture as a whole and celebrate the nation's diversity. From 1937 to 1941, thousands of writers set out ar.…