The New Deal: Conflicting Interpretations and Shifting Perspectives

Not only is the New Deal now truly a part of the past rather than the present, but it is also the subject of an ever-growing corpus of historical literature. Since the late 1960s and early1970s, scholarship about the Great Depression and the New Deal has grown more subtle, sophisticated and international in scope. While sociologists and political scientists have done a great deal to clarify aspects of the New Deal experience, much of the more recent historical scholarship on the subject has exposed the contradictions and contingencies that hampered the efforts of reformers to combat economic catastrophe.