Freedom from Fear
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
Between 1929 and 1945, two great travails were visited upon the American people: the Great Depression and World War II. Freedom from Fear tells the story of how Americans endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of those unprecedented calamities. David M. Kennedy 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. Kennedy 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. David M. Kennedy 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. - Publisher.
Reviews with the most likes.
I have gotten on a kick of reading the Oxford histories of the Americans.
The first two were about periods I did not know much about (1865-96 and 1789-1815), so their novelty to me may may have made me more positive than merited. Now that I have gone over this period, which I know reasonably well, I see that they people @ Oxford are doing something great. This is a very good book about a period that people think they know.
I was, as an aside, impressed by Kennedy's takedown of agriculture in the New Deal and, interestingly, I had never heard that farmers got themselves exempted from the draft (they also got themselves exempted from prohibition, btw).
There is a good insight into the Japanese imperial government in the war, too. It might have been good to see more cultural history of the depression decade, but not much.
Series
9 primary booksThe Oxford History of the United States is a 9-book series with 9 primary works first released in 1982 with contributions by Robert Middlekauff, Gordon S. Wood, and 7 others.
