The Darkest Year

The Darkest Year PDF Author: William K. Klingaman
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250133173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The Darkest Year is acclaimed author William K. Klingaman’s narrative history of the American home front from December 7, 1941 through the end of 1942, a psychological study of the nation under the pressure of total war. For Americans on the home front, the twelve months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor comprised the darkest year of World War Two. Despite government attempts to disguise the magnitude of American losses, it was clear that the nation had suffered a nearly unbroken string of military setbacks in the Pacific; by the autumn of 1942, government officials were openly acknowledging the possibility that the United States might lose the war. Appeals for unity and declarations of support for the war effort in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor made it appear as though the class hostilities and partisan animosities that had beset the United States for decades — and grown sharper during the Depression — suddenly disappeared. They did not, and a deeply divided American society splintered further during 1942 as numerous interest groups sought to turn the wartime emergency to their own advantage. Blunders and repeated displays of incompetence by the Roosevelt administration added to the sense of anxiety and uncertainty that hung over the nation. The Darkest Year focuses on Americans’ state of mind not only through what they said, but in the day-to-day details of their behavior. Klingaman blends these psychological effects with the changes the war wrought in American society and culture, including shifts in family roles, race relations, economic pursuits, popular entertainment, education, and the arts.

The Darkest Year

The Darkest Year PDF Author: William K. Klingaman
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250133173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The Darkest Year is acclaimed author William K. Klingaman’s narrative history of the American home front from December 7, 1941 through the end of 1942, a psychological study of the nation under the pressure of total war. For Americans on the home front, the twelve months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor comprised the darkest year of World War Two. Despite government attempts to disguise the magnitude of American losses, it was clear that the nation had suffered a nearly unbroken string of military setbacks in the Pacific; by the autumn of 1942, government officials were openly acknowledging the possibility that the United States might lose the war. Appeals for unity and declarations of support for the war effort in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor made it appear as though the class hostilities and partisan animosities that had beset the United States for decades — and grown sharper during the Depression — suddenly disappeared. They did not, and a deeply divided American society splintered further during 1942 as numerous interest groups sought to turn the wartime emergency to their own advantage. Blunders and repeated displays of incompetence by the Roosevelt administration added to the sense of anxiety and uncertainty that hung over the nation. The Darkest Year focuses on Americans’ state of mind not only through what they said, but in the day-to-day details of their behavior. Klingaman blends these psychological effects with the changes the war wrought in American society and culture, including shifts in family roles, race relations, economic pursuits, popular entertainment, education, and the arts.

Dont́ You Know There's a War On?

Dont́ You Know There's a War On? PDF Author: Richard R. Lingeman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


A Call to Arms

A Call to Arms PDF Author: Maury Klein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608194094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 916

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Book Description
The colossal scale of World War II required a mobilization effort greater than anything attempted in all of the world's history. The United States had to fight a war across two oceans and three continents--and to do so, it had to build and equip a military that was all but nonexistent before the war began. Never in the nation's history did it have to create, outfit, transport, and supply huge armies, navies, and air forces on so many distant and disparate fronts. The Axis powers might have fielded better-trained soldiers, better weapons, and better tanks and aircraft, but they could not match American productivity. The United States buried its enemies in aircraft, ships, tanks, and guns; in this sense, American industry and American workers, won World War II. The scale of the effort was titanic, and the result historic. Not only did it determine the outcome of the war, but it transformed the American economy and society. Maury Klein's A Call to Arms is the definitive narrative history of this epic struggle--told by one of America's greatest historians of business and economics--and renders the transformation of America with a depth and vividness never available before.

The Darkest Year

The Darkest Year PDF Author: William K. Klingaman
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250133181
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
The acclaimed narrative history of the American home front during WWII, from the attack on Pearl Harbor through 1942. For Americans on the home front, the twelve months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor comprised the darkest year of World War Two. Despite government attempts to disguise the magnitude of American losses, it was clear that the nation had suffered a nearly unbroken string of military setbacks in the Pacific; by the autumn of 1942, government officials were openly acknowledging the possibility that the United States might lose the war. Appeals for unity and declarations of support for the war effort made it appear as though the class hostilities and partisan animosities that had beset the United States for decades had suddenly disappeared. Yet a deeply divided American society was splintering even further as conflicting interest groups sought to turn the wartime emergency to their own advantage. Meanwhile, blunders and repeated displays of incompetence by the Roosevelt administration added to the sense of anxiety and uncertainty that hung over the nation. The Darkest Year focuses on Americans’ state of mind not only through what they said, but in the day-to-day details of their behavior. William K. Klingaman delves into the social and cultural changes wrought by war, including shifts in family roles, race relations, economic pursuits, popular entertainment, education, and the arts.

Supernatural Scotland

Supernatural Scotland PDF Author: Roderick Martine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ghosts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Japanese American Incarceration

Japanese American Incarceration PDF Author: Stephanie D. Hinnershitz
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812299957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government wrongfully imprisoned thousands of Japanese American citizens and profited from their labor. Japanese American Incarceration recasts the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II as a history of prison labor and exploitation. Following Franklin Roosevelt's 1942 Executive Order 9066, which called for the exclusion of potentially dangerous groups from military zones along the West Coast, the federal government placed Japanese Americans in makeshift prisons throughout the country. In addition to working on day-to-day operations of the camps, Japanese Americans were coerced into harvesting crops, digging irrigation ditches, paving roads, and building barracks for little to no compensation and often at the behest of privately run businesses—all in the name of national security. How did the U.S. government use incarceration to address labor demands during World War II, and how did imprisoned Japanese Americans respond to the stripping of not only their civil rights, but their labor rights as well? Using a variety of archives and collected oral histories, Japanese American Incarceration uncovers the startling answers to these questions. Stephanie Hinnershitz's timely study connects the government's exploitation of imprisoned Japanese Americans to the history of prison labor in the United States.

Six Men

Six Men PDF Author: Alistair Cooke
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497697786
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
Drawing on a lifetime of journalistic encounters with the great and the famous, Alistair Cooke profiles the six extraordinary men who impressed him the most Over the course of his sixty-year career as a broadcaster, television host, and newspaper reporter, Alistair Cooke met many remarkable people of the twentieth century. This entertaining and insightful collection shares his unique, often startling personal vision of six key figures from the worlds of literature, entertainment, and politics. They are: Charlie Chaplin, whom Cooke befriended in Hollywood and who courted controversy in his politics and romances; the charming-yet-naive Edward VIII, whose love affair changed the course of World War II; Humphrey Bogart, the first antihero hero onscreen and a sensitive gentleman at home; H. L. Mencken, brilliant, inspirational, and deeply flawed; Adlai Stevenson, whom Cooke labeled the failed saint; and Bertrand Russell, who had the courage and the audacity to try to make the world a better place. The subjects of Six Men are united by the deep complexities of their characters. In balancing informed details of their lives with an objectivity set against the ever-changing landscape of their times, Six Men is a master course in the art of concise biography.

Japan 1941

Japan 1941 PDF Author: Eri Hotta
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385350511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
A groundbreaking history that considers the attack on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective and is certain to revolutionize how we think of the war in the Pacific. When Japan launched hostilities against the United States in 1941, argues Eri Hotta, its leaders, in large part, understood they were entering a war they were almost certain to lose. Drawing on material little known to Western readers, and barely explored in depth in Japan itself, Hotta poses an essential question: Why did these men—military men, civilian politicians, diplomats, the emperor—put their country and its citizens so unnecessarily in harm’s way? Introducing us to the doubters, schemers, and would-be patriots who led their nation into this conflagration, Hotta brilliantly shows us a Japan rarely glimpsed—eager to avoid war but fraught with tensions with the West, blinded by reckless militarism couched in traditional notions of pride and honor, tempted by the gambler’s dream of scoring the biggest win against impossible odds and nearly escaping disaster before it finally proved inevitable. In an intimate account of the increasingly heated debates and doomed diplomatic overtures preceding Pearl Harbor, Hotta reveals just how divided Japan’s leaders were, right up to (and, in fact, beyond) their eleventh-hour decision to attack. We see a ruling cadre rich in regional ambition and hubris: many of the same leaders seeking to avoid war with the United States continued to adamantly advocate Asian expansionism, hoping to advance, or at least maintain, the occupation of China that began in 1931, unable to end the second Sino-Japanese War and unwilling to acknowledge Washington’s hardening disapproval of their continental incursions. Even as Japanese diplomats continued to negotiate with the Roosevelt administration, Matsuoka Yosuke, the egomaniacal foreign minister who relished paying court to both Stalin and Hitler, and his facile supporters cemented Japan’s place in the fascist alliance with Germany and Italy—unaware (or unconcerned) that in so doing they destroyed the nation’s bona fides with the West. We see a dysfunctional political system in which military leaders reported to both the civilian government and the emperor, creating a structure that facilitated intrigues and stoked a jingoistic rivalry between Japan’s army and navy. Roles are recast and blame reexamined as Hotta analyzes the actions and motivations of the hawks and skeptics among Japan’s elite. Emperor Hirohito and General Hideki Tojo are newly appraised as we discover how the two men fumbled for a way to avoid war before finally acceding to it. Hotta peels back seventy years of historical mythologizing—both Japanese and Western—to expose all-too-human Japanese leaders torn by doubt in the months preceding the attack, more concerned with saving face than saving lives, finally drawn into war as much by incompetence and lack of political will as by bellicosity. An essential book for any student of the Second World War, this compelling reassessment will forever change the way we remember those days of infamy.

The Year of Peril

The Year of Peril PDF Author: Tracy Campbell
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
A fascinating chronicle of how the character of American society revealed itself under the duress of World War II The Second World War exists in the American historical imagination as a time of unity and optimism. In 1942, however, after a series of defeats in the Pacific and the struggle to establish a beachhead on the European front, America seemed to be on the brink of defeat and was beginning to splinter from within. Exploring this precarious moment, Tracy Campbell paints a portrait of the deep social, economic, and political fault lines that pitted factions of citizens against each other in the post–Pearl Harbor era, even as the nation mobilized, government†‘aided industrial infrastructure blossomed, and parents sent their sons off to war. This captivating look at how American society responded to the greatest stress experienced since the Civil War reveals the various ways, both good and bad, that the trauma of 1942 forced Americans to redefine their relationship with democracy in ways that continue to affect us today.

Home Front U.S.A.

Home Front U.S.A. PDF Author: Allan M. Winkler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780882959832
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Examines the home-front achievements and repercussions of World War II on the United States, arguing that the process of mobilization forever changed the character of American life, and looking at the impact of the conflict on women, African-Americans, and other minorities, the Japanese-American people, politics, and the government.