Greenbelt Cooperator (Greenbelt, Md.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
866 issues from 1937 to 1954, published in Greenbelt, Maryland, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Greenbelt Cooperator started in 1937 as a mimeographed weekly newsletter produced for the residents of the town of Greenbelt, Maryland. Greenbelt was founded in 1935 as the brainchild of Rexford Tugwell, a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration who helped formulate the New Deal and embraced a collectivist vision of urban planning. The town became an official project of the United States Resettlement Administration, and the town welcomed its first residents in 1937.
The Cooperator, like many local newspapers, faithfully documented the growth of the community through its coverage of civic affairs, business, society, recreation, schools, and religion. Readers of the Cooperator could read about social gatherings such as a marshmallow roast, lectures by an expert in home economics, clubs such as the Veterans Legion, Girl Scouts and other children’s activities, and individual gatherings in people’s homes.
What separates the Cooperator from other small-town newspapers was its cooperative nature. The staff was organized as a cooperative, and the newspaper’s policies required that its members belong to at least one other cooperative in town. The stated purpose of the Cooperator was to promote the benefits of the cooperative movement as a social experiment. The editor and business manager were elected by the membership of the cooperative and by September 1939, copies of the newspaper were delivered to every address in Greenbelt.
Collectivist experiments…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Greenbelt, Maryland, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress