During the 1930s, the Republic of Czechoslovakia endeavored to construct a system of modern fortifications along its frontiers to protect the Republic from German and Hungarian aggression and from external Versailles revisionism. Czechoslovakia's fortifications have been greatly misrepresented through comparison with the Maginot Line. By utilizing extant German military reports, this thesis demonstrates that Czechoslovakia's fortifications were incomplete and were much weaker than the Maginot Line at the time of the Munich Crisis in 1938. The German threat of war against Czechoslovakia was very real in 1938 and Germany would have penetrated most of the fortifications and defeated Czechoslovakia quickly had a German-Czech war occurred in 1938.

Reacting to the Great Depression, Texans abandoned the philosophy of rugged individualism and turned to their state and federal governments for leadership. Texas's Governor Miriam Ferguson resultantly created the state's first relief agency, which administered all programs including those federally funded. Because the Roosevelt administration ordered state participation in and immediate implementation of the CCC, a multi-governmental, multi-departmental administrative alliance involving state and federal efforts resulted, which, because of scholars' preferences for research at the federal level, often is mistakenly described as a decentralized administration riddled with bureaucratic shortcomings. CCC operations within Texas, however, revealed that this complicated administrative structure embodied the reasons for the CCC's well-documented success.