The Civilian Conservation Corps was established on March 31, 1933 by President Franklin Roosevelt as part of his efforts to pull the country out of the Great Depression. The program lasted until July 2 1942, successfully creating work for a half-million unemployed young men across the nation. They were housed, fed, clothed, and taught trade skills while working in forests, parks, and range lands. Paid one dollar a day, each man was required to send home $25 a month; the program provided work for young men as well as support to thousands of families. South Dakota was home to more than 50 camps over the nine-year time span with projects in areas ranging from constructing bridges and buildings in state parks, thinning trees in national forests to mining rock, crushing it into gravel, and graveling roads. Although this volume is set in South Dakota, the photos are representative of camps and men from all over the nation who served in the CCCs.

Neil M. Maher examines the history of one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's boldest and most successful experiments, the Civilian Conservation Corps, describing it as a turning point both in national politics and in the emergence of modern environmentalism.

CCC veterans tell compelling stories of their experiences planting trees, fighting fires, building state parks, and reclaiming pastureland in this collective history of the CCC in Minnesota.

BETWEEN 1933 and 1942, nearly 200,000 young African-Americans participated in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's most successful New Deal agencies. In an effort to correct the lack of historical attention paid to the African-American contribution to the CCC, Olen Cole, Jr., examines their participation in the Corps as well as its impact on them. Though federal legislation establishing the CCC held that no bias of "race, color, or creed" was to be tolerated, Cole demonstrates that the very presence of African-Americans in the CCC, as well as the placement of the segregated CCC work camps in predominantly white California communities, became significant sources of controversy. Cole assesses community resistance to all-black camps, as well as the conditions of the state park camps, national forest camps, and national park camps where African-American work companies in California were stationed. He also evaluates the educational and recreational experiences of African-American CCC participants, their efforts to combat racism, and their contributions to the protection and maintenance of California's national forests and parks. Perhaps most important, Cole's use of oral histories gives voice to individual experiences: former Corps members discuss the benefits of employment, vocational training, and character development as well as their experiences of community reaction to all-black CCC camps. An important and much neglected chapter in American history, Cole's study should interest students of New Deal politics, state and national park history, and the African-American experience in the twentieth century.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Franklin D. Roosevelt¿s New Deal program to help young, unemployed men during the Great Depression by hiring them to work in a mammoth ¿forest army,¿ completed thousands of vital conservation projects nationwide. They were paid just $30 a month¿a dollar a day. In the Catskills, at CCC camps in Ulster County, Greene County, Schoharie County, Delaware County, and Broome County, city boys and their country cousins, under the tutelage of local woodsmen and mechanics, wielded axes, mattocks and shovels to transform the Catskills in subtle and significant ways, planting millions of trees (more than 3 1⁄2 million in Delaware County in 1934 alone), fighting stream and soil erosion, and building roads, fire towers, hiking trails, ski trails, and the campsites at North Lake, Woodland Valley, Devil¿s Tombstone and Beaverkill. This new history, illustrated with more than 100 photographs and maps, tells their story--who they were, where they came from, what they did, and the legacy they left behind.