Waubonsee Community College

Freedom from Fear, the American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, David M. Kennedy

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 859-871) and index

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index present

non fiction

Freedom from Fear

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40255850

David M. Kennedy

The Oxford history of the United States, v. 9

the American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. In a single volume the author tells how America endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities. He demonstrates that the economic crisis of the 1930s was more than a reaction to the excesses of the 1920s. For more than a century before the Crash, America's unbridled industrial revolution had gyrated through repeated boom and bust cycles, consuming capital and inflicting misery on city and countryside alike. Nor was the alleged prosperity of the 1920s as uniformly shared as legend portrays. Countless Americans eked out threadbare lives on the margins of national life. Roosevelt's New Deal wrenched opportunity from the trauma of the 1930s and created a lasting legacy of economic and social reform, but it was afflicted with shortcomings and contradictions as well. The author details the New Deal's problems and defeats, as well as its achievements. Yet, even as the New Deal was coping with the Depression, a new menace was developing abroad. Exploiting Germany's own economic burdens, Hitler reached out the disaffected, turning their aimless discontent into loyal support for the Nazi Party. In Asia, Japan harbored imperial ambitions of its own. The same generation of Americans who battled the Depression eventually had to shoulder arms in another conflict that wreaked worldwide destruction, ushered in the nuclear age, and forever changed their way of life and their country's relationship to the rest of the world. In the second installment of the chronicle, the author explains how the nation agonized over its role in the conflict, how it fought the war, and why the U.S. emerged victorious, and why the consequences of victory were sometimes sweet, sometimes ironic. The author analyses the determinants of American strategy, the painful choices faced by commanders and statesmen, and the agonies inflicted on the millions of ordinary Americans who were compelled to swallow their fears and face battle as best they could

The American People on the Eve of the Great Depression -- Panic -- The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover -- Interregnum -- The Hundred Days -- The Ordeal of the American People -- Chasing the Phantom of Recovery -- The Rumble of Discontent -- A Season for Reform -- Strike! -- The Ordeal of Franklin Roosevelt -- What the New Deal Did -- The Gathering Storm -- The Agony of Neutrality -- To the Brink -- War in the Pacific -- Unready Ally, Uneasy Alliance -- The War of Machines -- The Struggle for a Second Front -- The Battle for Northwest Europe -- The Cauldron of the Home Front -- Endgame -- The World the War Made

American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945