About this item
Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. This book tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities.The Depression was both a disaster and an opportunity. As David Kennedy vividly demonstrates, the economic crisis of the 1930s was far more than a simple reaction to the alleged excesses of the 1920s. For more than a century before 1929, America's unbridled industrial revolution had gyrated through repeated boom and bust cycles, wastefully consuming capital and inflicting untold misery on city and countryside alike.Freedom From Fear explores how the nation agonized over its role in World War II, how it fought the war, why the United States won, and why the consequences of victory were sometimes sweet, sometimes ironic.
About the Author
David M. Kennedy is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University and co-director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. After C. Vann Woodward's death, he was appointed series editor for the Oxford History of the United States series. His volume in the series, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Ambassador's Prize, and the California Gold Medal for Literature. He is the author of Over Here: The First World War and American Society, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, which won a Bancroft Prize. He lives in Palo Alto, California.
