An overview of the history of the Federal Writers' Project, hitting on critical reference points for our vision of what the project might look like today: the 1930s' FWP's cross-disciplinary integration of literature and history; the rejection of strict divisions between high and low culture; and the bottom-up approach to history that had begun profoundly to influence the discipline of history by the 1970s, embracing previously excluded groups, and gave rise to new sub-disciplines of oral history and public history. Ends with reflections on key questions those of us hoping to see a version of FWP today, many of the very same questions challenges faced by FWP in its first iteration. (Contains 2 endnotes.)