By David M. Kennedy

Among 1929 and 1945, nice travails have been visited upon the yank humans: the good melancholy and global battle II. This ebook tells the tale of the way american citizens persisted, and at last prevailed, within the face of these remarkable calamities.

The melancholy used to be either a catastrophe and a chance. As David Kennedy vividly demonstrates, the commercial concern of the Thirties was once excess of an easy response to the alleged excesses of the Twenties. For greater than a century earlier than 1929, America's unbridled commercial revolution had gyrated via repeated increase and bust cycles, wastefully eating capital and causing untold distress on urban and geographical region alike.

Freedom From Fear explores how the country agonized over its position in global warfare II, the way it fought the conflict, why the us gained, and why the implications of victory have been occasionally candy, occasionally ironic. In a compelling narrative, Kennedy analyzes the determinants of yankee process, the painful offerings confronted by way of commanders and statesmen, and the agonies inflicted at the hundreds of thousands of standard americans who have been forced to swallow their fears and face conflict as top they could.

Both complete and colourful, this account of the main convulsive interval in American heritage, excepting purely the Civil conflict, finds a interval that shaped the crucible during which glossy the United States was once shaped.

The Oxford heritage of the United States

The Atlantic Monthly has praised The Oxford background of the U.S. as "the so much exceptional sequence in American historic scholarship," a sequence that "synthesizes a generation's worthy of historic inquiry and data into one actually state of the art e-book. Who touches those books touches a profession."
Conceived below the final editorship of 1 of the major American historians of our time, C. Vann Woodward, The Oxford historical past of the us blends social, political, financial, cultural, diplomatic, and army heritage into coherent and vividly written narrative. earlier volumes are Robert Middlekauff's The excellent reason: the yankee Revolution; James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil warfare Era (which received a Pulitzer Prize and used to be a New York Times most sensible Seller); and James T. Patterson's Grand expectancies: the USA 1945-1974 (which gained a Bancroft Prize).

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Extra resources for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States)

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The exploitation of child labor, a practice that had outraged critics from Charles Dickens in Victorian England to Jane Addams in early twentieth-century America, had slowly receded as rising wages enabled a single wage-earner to support a family. 28 27. Recent Social Trends 1:666. See also Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 229. 28. Recent Social Trends 1:271ff. The Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 had been invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1918 in the case of Hammer v. S. 251), on the grounds that the act illegitimately relied on the commerce power to regulate local labor conditions.

The ten million women who worked for wages in 1929 were concentrated in a small handful of occupations including teaching, clerical work, domestic service, and the garment trades. As the service sector of the economy had expanded, so had women’s presence in the labor force. Women made up about 18 percent of all workers in 1900 and 22 percent in 1930, when about one of every four women was gainfully employed. The typical woman worker was single and under the age of twenty-five. Once she married, as almost every woman did, typically before the age of twenty-two, she was unlikely to work again for wages, particularly while she had children at home.

The flood of newcomers, vividly different from earlier migrants in faiths, tongues, and habits, aroused powerful anxieties about the capacity of American society to accommodate them. Some of that anxiety found virulent expression in a revived Ku Klux Klan, reborn in all its Reconstruction-era paraphernalia at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in 1915. Klan nightriders now rode cars, not horses, and they directed their venom as much at immigrant Jews and Catholics as at blacks. But the new Klan no less than the old represented a peculiarly American response to cultural upheaval.

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