The Civilian Conservation Corps in Alabama, 1933-1942: A Great and Lasting Good (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 0 77 appropriating the symbols and ceremonies of elite whites in support of their own dignity and humanity in parades and emancipation day celebrations . Public displays of this sort unnerved white women as they struggled to accept that black family life was no longer “legitimized by ownership” (p. 221). The arguments Glymph puts forth in Out of the House of Bondage have important implications for how historians treat women in slavery and in freedom. Glymph not only outlines the key conceptual frameworks and questions that have defined the field of southern women’s history since 1970, she moves emancipation studies forward by raising provocative questions about black and white women and their relationship to the meaning of freedom and citizenship. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for an analysis of violence when examining black and white women ’s social relations in the plantation household. Glymph’s insights will influence new research about the role of interracial violence in shaping black and white females’ relations in the nineteenth-century South. BRANDI C. BRIMMER Vanderbilt University The Civilian Conservation Corps in Alabama, 1933–1942: A Great and Lasting Good. By Robert Pasquill Jr. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. xii, 242 pp. $57.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8173-1621-1. $29.95 (paper ). ISBN 978-0-8173-5495-4. The Civilian Conservation Corps in Alabama joins a growing list of recent books on the operations and accomplishments of the Corps in specific states, notably New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. In addition, the National Park Service and at least sixteen states have documented New Deal–era architectural resources in national and state parks. Many of these structures, built by men enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) or employed through the Works Progress Administration or other work-relief programs, are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Several CCC museums have been established, and an undetermined number of oral history projects have recorded the remembrances of CCC veterans. Robert Pasquill’s contribution is more in the vein of a reference work than interpretive history. Indeed, the author does not even cite John Salmond’s 1967 bedrock classic, The Civilian Conservation Corps, which is hard to fathom and may say as much about the University of Alabama Press’s manuscript review process as it does the author’s oversight. Nonetheless, this compilation T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 78 provides a wealth of information about the organization of CCC projects in Alabama, the operation and output of specific camps, and the men who provided the labor. Pasquill’s book is an outgrowth of oral histories that the author, an archaeologist with the U.S. Forest Service, conducted with more than one hundred CCC veterans. Straightforward organization makes the book easy to use. Following a brief overview of Alabama in relation to the Great Depression and the New Deal, Chapter 2 explains how the CCC was organized in the state. The next five chapters describe each of the CCC camps organized to work on projects under the jurisdiction of the Forest Service, the Soil Conservation Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority projects, the Alabama state park system, and state and private forests . The format of these five chapters is the same: a camp-by-camp summary noting when each camp opened and closed and including as much detail about projects as the author could glean from internal reports, camp newspapers, local newspaper articles, recollections of CCC veterans , and related sources. Four appendixes list the camps in Alabama by type (such as the U.S. Forest Service, Soil Conservation Service), camps by enlistment period, Alabama camp newspapers and annuals, and oral history interviews. One of the nice features of this book is Appendix D, a compact disk inserted inside the back cover, where Pasquill shares abstracts of all the oral history interviews he conducted. It contains a name index followed by the abstracts in alphabetical order. Although salient information from interviews is incorporated into the camp summaries in the main text, there is an immediacy to the abstracts, which...