The following essays represent a selection of the work sparked and advanced by an interdisciplinary conference that took place at William & Mary in the Fall of 2023. “The New Deal & Its Legacies” cohered somewhat naturally around our three respective interventions into New Deal history. Adrienne Petty is a historian with a focus on agricultural history in the U.S. South, which gave rise to a panel on agricultural history and three essays in this issue: Tad Brown, Jarod Roll, and Mary Summers. Charles Palermo is an art historian, prompting a panel focused on the aesthetic and literary developments of the New Deal era. Those themes tie together three additional papers in the issue, from Walter Benn Michaels, Melanie Dawson, and Palermo himself. Finally, Katie Rader is a political scientist who focuses on the labor and civil rights legacies of the New Deal era, giving rise to the third and final panel focused on the policy innovations of the New Deal era. Most significantly, this panel brought to the fore important questions over the racial legacy of the New Deal, themes which are reflected in the final essay from John Finn. Informing the whole conference was a sense that this history remains relevant, instructive, and illustrative of contemporary issues and questions. This sense is reinforced by each of the contributions in this special issue. New Deal agricultural policy is a topic that remains ripe for exploration and fresh interpretations. In his essay on peanuts, Brown argues that the priorities of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and successive agencies clashed with the goals of peanut breeders at state experiment stations. While the goal of the AAA was to increase farm income by limiting the production of peanuts and other commodities, scientists in federally funded southern experiment stations were working to increase the yields of the many peanut varieties. Eventually, the federal government eliminated production controls altogether. Brown’s essay demonstrates yet another example of the contradictions that emerged within the New Deal agricultural state. While conceding the contradictions of farm and labor policy, Summers’s essay aims to rescue and recast the New Deal agricultural state’s legacy. Prevailing accounts of the New Deal agricultural state emphasize that most farm programs served to benefit big farmers, industrialists, and planters—at the expense of small farmers and a whole host of agricultural laborers. Summers’s essay acknowledges that the emphasis of these accounts has been to avoid a “whitewashing” of “profound evils in the nation’s past.” However, she argues that these efforts to recast history have also served to characterize agricultural New Dealers’ work based on their defeats rather than considering the ideas and programs they tried to put forward. Summers offers a retelling of the development of the USDA through three generations of Wallace’s, including the former USDA administrator Henry Wallace. These essays add rich detail and historical context to debates over the New Deal agricultural state. Roll’s essay bridges consideration of the New Deal agricultural state and the legacies of race and labor in the New Deal. His essay follows the advocacy work of an important Communist-led CIO local in the late 1930s—the United Cannery Agricultural Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA). New Deal scholarship tends to emphasize that the exclusion of agricultural workers represented both a capitulation to racist southern Democrats and a disinterest in organizing agricultural labor. Roll’s essay follows UCAPAWA’s successful campaign to expand the number of agricultural workers covered by labor and social welfare laws and to counter conservative efforts to restrict labor protections in both the Wagner Act (1935) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938). This is a remarkable success story for a “Communist-led union in Red Scare Washington.” Roll’s account recasts some of this racial legacy of the New Deal, themes that connect to Rader’s recent essay, “Race and the New Deal.” However, Finn’s essay traces an important inegalitarian legacy through the history of housing and redevelopment policies from the New Deal period to today. He highlights that both an interest in furthering racial segregation and advancing neoliberal ideologies of choice through housing policy significantly have curtailed both the New Deal and postwar construction of public housing. Drawing from historical and geographical evidence from housing redevelopment in Norfolk, Virginia, Finn also emphasizes the significant differences between public and private implementation of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and current proposals to redevelop African American and integrated communities in coastal Virginia. Roll’s and Finn’s rich accounts and efforts to make sense of the racial legacy of the New Deal state sparked significant and serious debate at the conference. Three papers on the art and literature of the New Deal era by Walter Benn Michaels, Melanie Dawson, and Charles Palermo round out the contributions we present here. Palermo considers James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which comprises photographs Evans made in 1936 and a text Agee wrote between 1936 and 1938. The text, which describes the lives of white tenant farmers in Hale County, Alabama, offers the equipment of the farmers’ lives as dual metaphors—standing in for both the double character of language (as both matter and meaning) and the double character of money (as both wealth and debt, building on an account of the monetary system by the chief of the Federal Reserve, Marriner Eccles). Evans, on Palermo’s account, does something similar with both his early Flaubertian prose efforts and his photographs, opposing the materiality of prose and photographic print to the possibility of circulation. Melanie Dawson considers the cultural meaning of the small, old-fashioned house in the era of the New Deal. Using the original house of the H.J. Heinz food company, Abigail and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s Bassett Hall, and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s eponymous little house as examples, she considers the significance of The Willows, a quaint little house of old design, in Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and other novels within the Kunstlerroman treating the life of her fictional writer Vance Weston. There, the little house functions as a New Deal-era symbol of the space of interiority, authenticity, and artistic autonomy. Walter Benn Michaels offers a reading of Call It Sleep, Henry Roth’s 1934 story about a young Jewish immigrant boy in New York City. Michaels considers the function of dialect and the theme of incest as key features of slightly older fiction’s ways of producing a fantasy of the purity of the race—William Faulkner’s 1929 The Sound and the Fury being the key text here. In Roth’s quasi-autobiographical novel, however, Michaels argues that the same themes—dialect and incest—have changed their function and produce not a fantasied purity of the race but the dream of a (Communist) universalism. Considered together, these essays draw upon historical, political, and artistic reflections on the New Deal era in ways that both offer a richer understanding of the New Deal historical moment and provide a fuller basis for reflecting on our current crossroads in American life. Standing at another moment of crisis, facing once again economic hardship and political division, seeking ways to understand the political meaning of our artistic and literary culture, the importance of this historically themed exchange was palpable. The editors expect that nonsite.org’s readers will understand this importance, too. We are grateful to all these authors for their contributions, to the conference, and to this special issue. We would also like to thank the other conference participants, whose engagement with these topics and themes also guided and shaped the essays published here: G. Jasper Connor, Andrew Falk, Brianna Nofil, Adolph Reed Jr., Francesca Sawaya, Rogers Smith, Levi Van Sant, and Ken Warren. Finally, we would like to thank our generous funders for the conference at William & Mary (the Department of Art and Art History, the Harrison Ruffin Tyler Department of History, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Office of the Provost) and Christopher Newport University (the College of Social Science, the Reiff Center, and the Departments of Political Science, History, Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology).