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Book Review
| The Civilian Conservation Corps in Nevada: From Boys to Men. By Renee Corona Kolvet and Victoria Ford. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2006. xxi + 200 pp. Illustrations, notes, tables, bibliography, and index. Cloth $34.95; The Civilian Conservation Corps in Arizona's Rim Country: Working in the Woods. By Robert J. Moore. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2006. xvi + 156 pp. Illustrations, notes, tables, bibliography, and index. Cloth $34.95.
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| These two monographs on Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) share numerous characteristics. Both focus on the CCC and its conservation projects in the western United States, each examines in detail the Corps' impact on the local level, and the authors of these books all use oral interviews with former Corps enrollees to help construct their histories. The result is a pair of interesting, well researched, and readable descriptions of the CCC program, its conservation work, and the experiences of Corps enrollees in Nevada and across Arizona's Rim Country. Yet in focusing primarily on facts, these two books also share a missed opportunity to place the CCC into a broader, more analytical context that could have shed new light on the New Deal and the Great Depression era. |
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Renee Corona Kolvet and Victoria Ford undertook their study of the Corps in Nevada in order to "raise awareness of this popular New Deal program" (p. 4). They accomplish this by weaving together each of their research expertise. Kolvet, a research archeologist from the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas, conducted archival and field work that allowed her to locate, visit, and map all of the fifty-nine CCC camps that operated in Nevada. Ford, an oral historian who once worked for the University of Nevada Oral History Program, interviewed fifteen former enrollees about their time spent in the Corps. The authors supplement this unique blending of methodologies with examination of local, state, and national sources such as town newspapers, government reports from state land managers, and official publications from the Corps' headquarters in Washington, D.C. This "melding of history and personal recollections," the authors rightly claim, "helps capture the human side of this unparalleled effort to save a generation at risk" (p. 4). |
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