Originally published as one vol. in 1999

First issued as a one-volume Oxford University Press paperback, 2001. First issued as a two-volume Oxford University Press paperback, 2004

Includes bibliographical references and index.

v.1: The American people in depression and war, 1929-1945. -- v.2: The American people in World War II.

On October 24, 1929, America met the greatest economic devastation it had ever known. In the first installment of his two-part chronicle the author tells how America endured, and eventually prevailed, in the face of that unprecedented calamity, the Great Depression. He 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. 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. The author analyes the determinants of American stategy, the painful choices faced by commanders and statesmen, and the agonies inflicted on the milllions of ordinary Americans who were compelled to swallow their fears and face battle as best they could