The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Guess what? The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is nearly upon us.

And to think about this occasion, and what it means, I've asked Jill Leport to join us.

Jill's been a staff writer at The New Yorker for many years.

And just this month, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book, We the People,

a history of the U.S. Constitution.

Jill Lepore is a professor of history and law at Harvard University, and she's our host for today's

program.

Way back in the 1930s, in the dark days of the Great Depression, with democracy on the rocks,

the U.S. government hired more than 6,000 out-of-work writers for something called the Federal

Writers Project.

They brought on all kinds of writers from newspaper reporters to playwrights, anybody who

used to make some kind of a living by writing and couldn't anymore.

Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow,

Zorneal Hurston, John Cheever,

Richard Wright, they all got involved.

Studs Terkel, too.

He got his start at the Federal Writers Project.

The government sent those writers out all over the country,

to talk to people, to listen to people, to chronicle American life.

The project's folklore editor, Benjamin Botkin, said he wanted to turn the streets, the stockyards, and the hiring halls into literature.

...