Drawing on more than thirty years of meticulous research, Kay Rippelmeyer details the Depression-era history of the simultaneous creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. Through the stories of the men who worked in CCC camps devoted to soil and forest conservation projects, she offers a fascinating look into an era of utmost significance to the identity, citizens, wildlife, and natural landscape of the region.
Rippelmeyer outlines the geologic and geographic history of southern Illinois, from Native American uses of the land to the timber industry’s decimation of the forest by the 1920s. Detailing both the economic hardships and agricultural land abuse plaguing the region during the Depression, she reveals how the creation of the CCC under Franklin Delano Roosevelt coincided with the regional campaign for a national forest and how locals first became aware of and involved with the program.
Rippelmeyer mined CCC camp records from the National Archives, newspaper accounts and other correspondence and conducted dozens of oral interviews with workers and their families to re-create life in the camps. An extensive camp compendium augments the volume, featuring numerous photographs, camp locations and dates of operation, work history, and company rosters. Satisfying public curiosity and the need for factual information about the camps in southern Illinois, this is an essential contribution to regional history and a window to the national impact of the CCC.
West of the Four Corners and east of the Colorado River, in southeastern Utah, a unique one-hundred-mile-long, two-hundred-foot-high, serrated cliff cuts the sky. Whether viewed as barrier wall or sheltering sanctuary, Comb Ridge has helped define life and culture in this region for thousands of years. Today, the area it crosses is still relatively remote, though an important part of a scenic complex of popular tourist destinations that includes Natural Bridges National Monument and Grand Gulch just to the west, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and Lake Powell a bit farther west, Canyonlands National Park to the north, Hovenweep National Monument to the east, and the San Juan River and Monument Valley to the south. Prehistorically Comb Ridge split an intensively used Ancient Puebloan homeland. It later had similar cultural—both spiritual and practical—significance to Utes, Paiutes, and Navajos and played a crucial role in the history of European American settlement. To tell the story of this rock that is unlike any other rock in the world and the diverse people whose lives it has affected, Robert S. McPherson, author of multiple books on Navajos and on the Four Corners region, draws on the findings of a major, federally funded project to research the cultural history of Comb Ridge. He carries the story forward to contention over present and future uses of Comb Ridge and the spectacular country surrounding it.
Shawn Hall's immensely popular guidebooks to Nevada ghost towns have become essential resources for backcountry explorers and scholars alike. Now Hall returns to Elko County to survey the county's railroad and stage stations, as well as other sites not included in his earlier survey of this colorful section of the state. As in his earlier volumes, Hall includes a history of each site he lists, along with period and contemporary photographs, directions for locating the sites, and an assessment of their present condition. His historical accounts, based on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, are both scholarly and engaging, rich in anecdotes and personalities, and in the fascinating minutia of history often ignored by more academic writers. Shawn Hall's dedication to documenting Nevada's thousands of historic sites has enriched our knowledge of the state's relatively brief but very eventful past. Connecting the West is a worthy addition to Hall's remarkable efforts to preserve the state's history.
With its dignified courthouse set among shade trees and lawns dotted with monuments to prominent citizens and fallen veterans, the courthouse square remains the civic center in a majority of the county seats of Texas. Yet the squares themselves vary in form and layout, reflecting the different town-planning traditions that settlers brought from Europe, Mexico, and the United States. In fact, one way to trace settlement patterns and ethnic dispersion in Texas is by mapping the different types of courthouse squares.
This book offers the first complete inventory of Texas courthouse squares, drawn from extensive archival research and site visits to 139 of the 254 county seats. Robert Veselka classifies every existing plan by type and origin, including patterns and variants not previously identified. He also explores the social and symbolic functions of these plans as he discusses the historical and modern uses of the squares. He draws interesting new conclusions about why the courthouse square remains the hub of commercial and civic activity in the smaller county seats, when it has lost its prominence in others.
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