Oxford History of the United States #9: Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Named a 1999 Outstanding Academic Book by Choice.

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. In a compelling narrative, Kennedy analyzes 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.

Both comprehensive and colorful, this account of the most convulsive period in American history, excepting only the Civil War, reveals a period that formed the crucible in which modern America was formed.

The Oxford History of the United States

The Atlantic Monthly has praised The Oxford History of the United States as "the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship," a series that "synthesizes a generation's worth of historical inquiry and knowledge into one literally state-of-the-art book. Who touches these books touches a profession."

Conceived under the general editorship of one of the leading American historians of our time, C. Vann Woodward, The Oxford History of the United States blends social, political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military history into coherent and vividly written narrative. Previous volumes are Robert Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution; James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (which won a Pulitzer Prize and was a New York Times Best Seller); and James T. Patterson's Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974 (which won a Bancroft Prize).

"David Kennedy is one of America's most distinguished historians, and Freedom from Fear is a remarkable achievement: deeply researched, insightful, and beautifully written. Fast-paced, it presents vivid portraits of major actors such as Roosevelt, Churchill, and Hitler, as well as of the hopes and fears of millions of lesser-known people caught up in the tumultuous years of the Great Depression and of World War II." James T. Patterson, Bancroft Prize-winning author of Grand Expectations

David M. Kennedy is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of Over Here: The First World War and American Society, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, which won a Bancroft Prize. He lives in Stanford, California.

Maps
Acknowledgments
Editor's Introduction
Abbreviated Titles Used in Citations
Prologue: November 11, 1918
1. The American People on the Eve of the Great Depression
2. Panic
3. The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover
4. Interregnum
5. The Hundred Days
6. The Ordeal of the American People
7. Chasing the Phantom of Recovery
8. The Rumble of Discontent
9. A Season for Reform
10. Strike!
11. The Ordeal of Franklin Roosevelt
12. What the New Deal Did
13. The Gathering Storm
14. The Agony of Neutrality
15. To the Brink
16. War in the Pacific
17. Unready Ally, Uneasy Alliance
18. The War of Machines
19. The Struggle for a Second Front
20. The Battle for Northwest Europe
21. The Cauldron of the Home Front
22. Endgame
Epilogue: The World the War Made
Bibliographical Essay
Index