Uplifted by the happy oyster video (below), we’re off to Hyde Park, New York, on Saturday 6/19 (taking a train, naturally!) for the seventh annual Roosevelt Reading Festival at the FDR Presidential Library—free and open to the public. The keynote address will be given by Alan Brinkley, New Deal scholar and Columbia University professor, and author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Oxford University Press, 2009). Along with Brinkley, one of the main attractions for us will be Neil M. Maher, author of Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the Environmental Movement (Oxford, 2008). We hope to meet with Dr. Maher and geek out on the CCC—one of the most popular New Deal programs, that FDR designed himself and signed into law in March 1933, his first month in office.

Authors will read from and discuss their books on the New Deal’s “alphabet soup” of agencies, FDR and Churchill, the G. I. Bill, Marian Anderson’s great Lincoln Memorial concert (arranged by Eleanor Roosevelt), a new biography of FDR’s political adviser Louis Howe, the quest for civil rights in the Roosevelt era and the flight of refugee Jews from the Nazi Germany, and much more.

Participating in the Reading Festival will be FDR’s grandson David B. Roosevelt. The program notes that “Mr. Roosevelt authored a concept paper (based upon the Civilian Conservation Corps) for the Clinton Administration which eventually became the National Civilian Community Corps department of AmeriCorps. As a consequence David B. Roosevelt was appointed to serve on the national board for the National Civilian Community Corps.”

Click here for the Reading Festival’s full agenda and author list.

Click here to read about Nick Taylor’s American-Made, a fine history of the WPA.

Click here or the photo above to hear Ben Selvin and the Crooners play “Happy Days Are Here Again” (1930).