This podcast is a timely history lesson about the electrification of rural America and the Depression-era program that made it happen. The Rural Electrification Act of 1936 – the REA – provided federal loans to install electrical distribution systems to serve rural areas. The REA may offer lessons as we invest to extend high speed broadband service across the country.

To learn about the REA and its impacts, we’re talking with Price Fishback, APS Professor of Economics at the Eller College of Management of the University of Arizona, an expert on the political economy of Roosevelt’s New Deal during the 1930s.