The banner for this blog evokes the importance of transportation and industry in the history of the United States. It is a portion of Port of Philadelphia by Robert Muchley (1936). Muchley was one among many artists employed during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, to create publicity posters. The Library of Congress features 908 of these posters in its web exhibition By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943.
Port of Philadelphia. 1936. Robert Muchley. Library of Congress.
About Mark Souther
I am an associate professor of history at Cleveland State University and public history director of the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities. I'm the author of New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City, editor of American Tourism: Constructing a National Tradition (forthcoming), and am researching a new book on perceptions of decline in postwar Cleveland. Apart from my involvement in CPHDH, I authored a recent successful National Register of Historic Places nomination and serve on the Cleveland Heights Landmark Commission. My history interests include urban and suburban history, 20th-century U.S. political and cultural history, leisure and tourism, and architecture and historic preservation, not to mention that I'm a self-indulgent hunter-gatherer of antiques and ephemera.
