Items

The production of these items was administered at the state level in at least twenty-three states by WPA sub-agencies working in conjunction with local boards of education, colleges, museums, or other bodies. The WPA and its various sub-agencies put millions of the unemployed back to work during the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930's. At the state level, many of the WPA sub-agencies producing educational visual aids were named "Museum Extension Project" or "Visual Aids Project." However, depending on the state, these programs may have had different names. The WPA's Pennsylvania Museum Extension Project (sometimes called the State-Wide Museum Extension Project, or simply as the Museum Extension Project) was the most successful and prolific of these programs and served as a model for other states. For purposes of shorthand, we shall refer to all the WPA-administered educational visual aid programs using the name "Museum Extension Project" (MEP).

Education by Design is an online exhibit and image database of educational visual aids produced by the Museum Extension Project (MEP), a division of the New Deal jobs creation program, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and owned by the Bienes Museum of Modern Book at Broward County Library in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The digitization of these historic artifacts was made possible through a National Leadership grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), a federal agency that fosters innovation, leadership and a lifetime of learning.

The Catalog

*NOTE BRAILLE