Freedom From Fear; The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. First Oxford University Paperback Edition. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. xviii, [2], 936, [4] pages. Illustrations. Maps. Footnotes. Bibliographical Essay. Index. Inscribed and dated by the author to Paul Belman (?) on title page. Cover has slight wear and soiling. This is Volume IX of The Oxford History of the United States. This work was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2000. David Michael Kennedy (born July 22, 1941 in Seattle, Washington) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning historian specializing in American history. He is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University and the former Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history. Kennedy is responsible for the recent editions of the popular history textbook The American Pageant. He is also the current editor (since 1999) of the Oxford History of the United States series. This position was held previously by C. Vann Woodward. Earlier in his career, Kennedy won the Bancroft Prize for his first book Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970), and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his book World War I, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980). He was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History in 1995-6. 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 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.