Reddit reviews Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States)

I am now a history teacher, and I attribute this career path to one book that really got my interest in The Depression and WWII, which is easily my favorite time period to learn about or discuss. PLEASE, read "Freedom from Fear: The American people in Depression and War 1929-1945" by the amazing David M. Kennedy. It will give you a better understanding of why America is the country it today and how we got through one of the most difficult time periods in US history, largely through the leadership of FDR. It won the Pulitzer Prize for History and is part of the Oxford series of US history books.


https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Fear-American-Depression-1929-1945/dp/0195144031

Yes this. This is by far his most interesting book (although I haven't read his most recent one yet). Did you know that tri-color vision is unique in the mammals to howler monkeys and apes? And that we know it evolved separately in the howlers and the apes due to geographic separation and fundamental differences in the color-sensing mechanism*? That blew my mind. You learn stuff like that almost every page in The Ancestor's Tale. And the way it traces human lineage back through time makes you appreciate the immense scale, scope, and power of evolution.

My other suggestions would be:

• Freedom from Fear by David Kennedy - American history through the depression and WWII
  
  
• Genome by Matt Ridley - Analysis of the human genome and genetics
  
  
• Failure is Not an Option by Gene Kranz - History of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions told by Gene Kranz, veteran flight director (and a decent writer to boot)
  
  *This is from memory - so I might be slightly off, but you get the point.

1)Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1926-1945 - David Kennedy

2)From Colony to Superpower: US Foreign Relations Since 1776 - George Herring

3)History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective - E. K. Hunt and Mark Lautzenheiser

4)When Washington Shut Down Wall Street: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of America's Monetary Supremacy - William Silber

5)Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond

6)A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present - Howard Zinn

7)20th Century Baseball Chronicle: A Year-By-Year History of Major League Baseball (what? you asked for history books sitting on my shelf)

8)Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics : The History of the Explosive That Changed the World - Jack Kelly

and currently I've just started working on U.S. Bank Deregulation in Historical Perspective - Charles Calomiris. Should be interesting since it was published in 2000...

edit: I like Drited's idea, so I'll take some time to add on some stuff. 1, 2, 4, and 6 give me perspective on how government institutions interact with each other and with the public they are supposed to serve as time and events take place, shaping the history of the US. 3 has given me insight into the evolution of Neoclassical and Labor-value (Marxian) economics. Though Hunt writes with a very heavy labor bias, his book has shown me how a persons beliefs affect there analysis, even when claiming to be value-free. In it he discusses the origins of marginal productivity and efficient markets, and his writings have allowed me to grasp in economic terms why certain ideas are flawed, even though I already knew them to be false after I had studied Psychology. 5 and 8 are a bit different because to me, they remind me that it's not what actually happened that matters, our interpretation of history relies solely on the importance we give those events. All and all, the above texts give me a longer time frame in which to view current events. In fact that's why I like companies such as GOOG and GS so much is because the above readings allow me to look beyond balance sheets, and gives me alternative ways to judge a potential investment. I understand GOOG's importance to the internet world, and the internets importance to our world, and how that relationship might continue on into the future. Stuff like that

Like Sevsquad said, that video is highly misleading. Economic conditions in Great Britain are vastly different from those in the US.

One major contributor to the Great Depression was the Southern agriculture industry; if you read the Grapes of Wrath, you would know that southern farmers' lives were completely destroyed by the depression and many workers were uprooted. Nothing the government could have done would have stopped the agricultural industry's collapse, nor would it have stopped the persistent drought that followed. Agriculture also took the longest to recover. The Depression in the US is not a sudden phase that this video implies was the case in Britain (I did not study British economic history, so I won't comment on this).

The New Deal policies helped, but on a much smaller level than was expected and, until recently, believed. Historians do believe that the New Deal policies did not pull the country out of the depression; some programs were better than others, some helped, some hurt. At the same time, it is a major school of thought that the New Deal policies were necessary on a political level, on a level to prevent the collapse of the US as a country. People were never so demoralized as they were during that period; the idea that the government still doesn't care for them would have undoubtedly turned that demoralization into blind rage, as it had in Germany and Italy. Plus we cannot deny that there were a lot of good programs out of the New Deal: the CCC for conservation, the SEC for regulating the stock market (the regulatory body today is a joke compared to previous times), the program to document the narratives of the last living slaves, etc.. Lumping together the New Deal as one package is also problematic, since it consisted of relief, recovery, and reform; social security is a reform that has had a lasting impact on our nation, and has likely alleviated the worst of any depression/recession since (before this, if you were old, you were likely to be unemployed and die penniless).

I honestly do not know enough economics to judge whether or not war is good or bad for the economy. From a historical perspective, it would seem that economic recovery coincided with WWII. Perhaps the guy in the video defined wealth in a way such that war wouldn't increase wealth, or maybe our definition of wealth is inadequate to capture the rising standards of living. In any case, the economy recovered far faster during WWII than it did during the New Deal, and many historians have attributed the cause of the recovery to WWII.

Herbert Hoover was definitely a misunderstood president. He didn't act with any pressing speed at the initial signs of the Great Depression, hence earning his infamous quote "Prosperity is just around the corner!" In fact, most of his actions can be characterized as follows: let the government bring together the business heads, and they will help each other out. Except they couldn't or didn't. For instance, rather than the government help out the failing banks, bring the bank heads together and ask them to bail each other out; that didn't work because every bank was in danger of failing. Once he realized the magnitude of the problem (he's an engineer, so it didn't take long), he did quite a bit of stuff, but his infamy already stuck. The federal government itself was far too small to have any effective impact, so given the little time he had left, there really was little he could do.

FDR continued this trend of increasing government intervention after Hoover. At first, FDR acted with caution; lets not forget that FDR is from an aristocratic family, and so his approach to this unprecedented problem would be rather cautious for the sake of businesses. After the lack of results, he increased the scale of his projects. Hence the historical debate on whether or not FDR was TOO slow on his programs for the New Deal to have it's intended impact, or whether it was a hopeless misguided attempt in the first place.

If you want to learn the most standard history on the Great Depression and WWII, look no further from "Freedom From Fear" by David M. Kennedy. Amazing book, pretty neutral on its presentation.

http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Fear-American-Depression-1929-1945/dp/0195144031/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321442648&sr=8-1