| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"A grand historical synthesis...this is the kind of book prizes are made for."--Chicago Tribune
"This is modern America's story--modern America's most thrilling, most irresistible, and most significant story--and in this massive volume, David M. Kennedy makes it his story in a way that no one has before. Freedom From Fear, the fourth installment of the new Oxford History of the United States to appear, is as much a triumph as its predecessors, providing every indication that the series, once completed, will stand as the most comprehensive and most compelling narrative history of the nation." --Boston Globe
"Rarely does a work of historical synthesis combine such trenchant analysis and elegant writing as does Kennedy's spectacular contribution to the Oxford History of the United States. Kennedy uses a wide canvas to depict all aspects of the American political, social and economic experience from 1929 to 1945. He also provides a stunningly original reinterpretation of th
Product Description
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. 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, wastefullly consuming capital and inflicting untold misery on city and countryside alike. Nor was the fabled prosperity of the 1920s as uniformly shared ag legend portrays. Countless Americans, especially if they were farmers, African Americans, or recent immigrants, eked out thread bare lives on the margins of national life. For them the Depression was but another of the ordeals of fear and insecurity with which they were sadly familiar. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal wrung from the trauma of the 1930s a lasting legacy of economic and social reform, in cluding the Social Security Act, new banking and financial laws, regulatory legistlation, and new opportunities for organized labour. Taken together, those reforms gave a measure of security to millons of Americans who had never had much of it, and with a fresh sense of having a stake in their country. Freedom from Fear tells the story of the New Deal's achievments, without slighting its shortcomings, contraditions and failures. It is a story rinch in drama and peopled with unforgettable personalities, including the incandescent but enigmatic figure of Roosevelt himself. Even as the New Deal was coping with the Depression, a still more fearsome menace was developing abroad--Hitler's thirst for war in Europe, coupled with the imperial ambitions of Japan in Asia. The same generation of Americans who battled the Depression evenutally had to shoulder the arms in another conflict that wreaked world wide destruction, ushered in the nuclear age and forever changed their own way of life and their country's relationship to the rest of the world. Freedom from Fear explains 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, Kenney 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. Freedom from Fear is a comprehensive and colourful account of the most convulsive period in American history, excepting only the Civil War - a period that formed the crucible in which modern America was formed.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
Like an earthquake, the stock market crash of October 1929 cracked startlingly across the United States, the herald of a crisis that was to shake the American way of life to its foundations. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Like an earthquake, the stock market crash of October 1929 cracked startlingly across the United States, the herald of a crisis that was to shake the American way of life to its foundations. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great political history of America in depression and war,
By
This review is from: Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States) (Paperback)
There is much to like about David Kennedy's history of the United States during the 1930s and early 1940s. His book is an excellent overview of the political and economic history of the period. His examination of the New Deal is both insightful and judicious, while his description of America in the Second World War is gripping and informative. Throughout the book Kennedy offers a penetrating analysis of events, discerning approaches that reshaped many of the fundamental relations that existed between the American people and their government.Yet in some respects the volume is something of a disappointment. The book is a contribution to the superb 'Oxford History of the United States' series, which has set a high standard with its earlier volumes. It is by this measure that Kennedy's book is wanting; it is hardly the comprehensive examination of its topic that the earlier volumes were, as his focus on politics and economics gives short shrift to American culture and society during the period. Moreover, his prose often seems excessively grandiose. Efforts to create soaring metaphors often become too labored and fall flat, making for a stark contrast with the clear descriptions and jargon-free analysis they buttress. Nevertheless, Kennedy's achievement with this book is impressive. He has provided a well-written account of America's efforts to deal with some of the greatest challenges that the nation ever faced. Readers seeking a history of the period would be hard pressed to find a better and more readable book with which to start.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A monumental historical work.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-45 (Oxford History of the United States) (Hardcover)
Professor Kennedy has given us a monumental work on a critical period in the history of the United states and the world. Kennedy displays an intuitve understanding of the causes of the great depression. He gives us a new and positive inter- pretation of Herbert Hoover. In Kennedy's view the ''Great Engineer'' is a closet liberal who paved the way for the new deal. Kennedy clearly is an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt,but is not blind to his hero's shortcomings. The author frankly admits that the new deal did not end the depression and that during WWII Roosevelt was decieved by Joseph Stalin. Kennedy gives a superb account of the political radicalism of the thirties complete with unforgetable portraits of Huey Long and Father Coughlin. The account of the second world war also rises to the occassion. I found this book to be a fascinating read and I highly reccomend it. Thank you Professor Kennedy.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A magnificent history, especially strong on the Depression,
By A Customer
This review is from: Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-45 (Oxford History of the United States) (Hardcover)
Kennedy's prose surges to climax after climax as he takes the reader through the traumas and transitions of Depression and World War 2. He is especially good capturing the social calamities of the Depression, the labor struggles and the brave tentativeness of the New Deal (to at least secure the lives of the citizenry, in the absence of a successful economic remedy). The book is revealing on many matters: the radicalism of politics in the mid to late1930s (a 2% 'magic' tax advocated back then resurfaced in Australian fringe politics only recently ); the focus by Americans on the Depression as an internal issue; and the chimeral character of Roosevelt. The half of the book devoted to the War does not flag, but there is less insight into the lives of those at the 'home front' and perhaps too much battle description. Against that, the account of the nation's reluctant shift from isolationism into world conflict is superbly done. In the wonderful Oxford series so far, Freedom From Fear stands beside the great Civil War volume, Battle Cry of Freedom.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
