How the New Deal built Florida tourism: the Civilian Conservation Corps and state parks

Abstract

Europeans to come to Czechoslovakia in the early Cold War years, it was practically impossible for US citizens. Pedersen also deals with the individual stages of tourism development. He states that even as late as 1980, Western tourists perceived Eastern Europe as an unknown and almost exotic territory. Two more studies need to be mentioned to fully appreciate the weight of the whole publication. The first one is Michal Fejtl’s chapter, which fills the gap in the historiography regarding Czech and Slovak spa resorts. Although he concentrates on a case study of the spa town Mariánské Lázně in West Bohemia, his findings can be applied to most spa areas in the rest of the country. The author includes intriguing details about the stays of domestic and foreign visitors. Special attention is paid to the East and West Germans’ visits, and their mutual celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. The other study is Petra Schindler-Wisten’s chapter, which adds an essential element to the volume – the relatively widespread Czech phenomenon of cottages and weekend houses, which has retained its importance among the Czech population to the present. As the author states, some 12 percent of Czech households have a recreational property – one of the highest among European nations. The authors use very cultivated language, making the text convenient to read for both the academic community and the broader public. As part of the effort to offer a factually dense text, the authors, Mücke in particular, include period-style jokes and anecdotes in the text, but their randomness is sometimes disruptive. Quoted statements by narrators that are repeatedly used by other authors are appreciated as historical testimonies, but some of them are quite superfluous in the context of the narrative. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the reviewed publications fundamentally fill a gap in the research of Czech/Czechoslovak history after 1945. The results reveal knowledge about various forms of tourism, regulations, and management in the communist regime. It is necessary to appreciate the transmission of new information to the reader and the scientific verification of what was previously considered ‘common knowledge’, personal memories of older generations, or curiosities in popular articles. The authors transformed these into a comprehensive framework adding significant value to contemporary historiography.