Here are 100 books that War, Economy and Society, 1939-1945 fans have personally recommended if you like
War, Economy and Society, 1939-1945.
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As a scholar, I take pleasure in developing novel interpretations and arguments and persuading colleagues and readers of their merits. Over the past two decades, I’ve advanced a new macroeconomic narrative for the United States. In earlier publications, I argued that the Depression years were the most technologically progressive of the twentieth century. Behind the backdrop of double-digit unemployment, potential output grew rapidly, an increase that helped enable the country to produce prodigious amounts of WWII armaments. It also, I maintain, established most of the supply side foundations for the golden age (1948-73). The conventional wisdom tends instead to credit U.S. postwar economic dominance to experience manufacturing military durables.
The book gives great insight into the role of organized efforts at persuasion in establishing and reinforcing much of what we think we know about mobilization for the war.
Business wanted credit for the success of war production, even though most of it was achieved in government owned, government operated (GOGO) or government owned, contractor operated (GOCO) plants. The public sector played a much larger role in planning, directing, and controlling the mobilization effort than business wished the American public to acknowledge.
During World War II, the United States helped vanquish the Axis powers by converting its enormous economic capacities into military might. Producing nearly two-thirds of all the munitions used by Allied forces, American industry became what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "the arsenal of democracy." Crucial in this effort were business leaders. Some of these captains of industry went to Washington to coordinate the mobilization, while others led their companies to churn out weapons. In this way, the private sector won the war-or so the story goes.
Based on new research in business and military archives, Destructive Creation shows that…
As a scholar, I take pleasure in developing novel interpretations and arguments and persuading colleagues and readers of their merits. Over the past two decades, I’ve advanced a new macroeconomic narrative for the United States. In earlier publications, I argued that the Depression years were the most technologically progressive of the twentieth century. Behind the backdrop of double-digit unemployment, potential output grew rapidly, an increase that helped enable the country to produce prodigious amounts of WWII armaments. It also, I maintain, established most of the supply side foundations for the golden age (1948-73). The conventional wisdom tends instead to credit U.S. postwar economic dominance to experience manufacturing military durables.
Natural rubber was the one strategic material for which the United States had effectively no domestic sourcing. In February 1942, the Japanese overran Singapore, and shortly thereafter seized control of all the rubber exporting sites in Southeast Asia, effectively depriving the U.S. of more than 95 percent of its supply.
The effects of the U.S. rubber famine on the U.S. economy and its military capability were dire. Much attention has been given to the U.S. development of a synthetic rubber industry, much less to the search for plant-based alternatives to Hevea brasiliensisas a source of latex.
Finlay’s narrative provides a fascinating and informative discussion of these efforts.
As a scholar, I take pleasure in developing novel interpretations and arguments and persuading colleagues and readers of their merits. Over the past two decades, I’ve advanced a new macroeconomic narrative for the United States. In earlier publications, I argued that the Depression years were the most technologically progressive of the twentieth century. Behind the backdrop of double-digit unemployment, potential output grew rapidly, an increase that helped enable the country to produce prodigious amounts of WWII armaments. It also, I maintain, established most of the supply side foundations for the golden age (1948-73). The conventional wisdom tends instead to credit U.S. postwar economic dominance to experience manufacturing military durables.
Iconic images of the Willow Run plant, built by the U.S. government but operated by Ford, have probably done more than anything else to cement in the minds of scholars and the public the standard narratives about mobilization for the Second World War.
In fact, Willow Run was a questionable success, employing at its peak barely 40 percent of the headcount for which it was designed. It eventually relied extensively on subcontracting, which Ford had intended to avoid. And, because Ford insisted on freezing designs for substantial periods, Willow Run B-24s had to be flown to government modification centers before they could be used in combat.
As late as 1943, the Truman Committee was threatening to transfer the plant to another contractor because Ford’s performance had been so abysmal. But if Ford’s record as a builder of bombers was mixed, there is no question that the company operated a world-class…
As a scholar, I take pleasure in developing novel interpretations and arguments and persuading colleagues and readers of their merits. Over the past two decades, I’ve advanced a new macroeconomic narrative for the United States. In earlier publications, I argued that the Depression years were the most technologically progressive of the twentieth century. Behind the backdrop of double-digit unemployment, potential output grew rapidly, an increase that helped enable the country to produce prodigious amounts of WWII armaments. It also, I maintain, established most of the supply side foundations for the golden age (1948-73). The conventional wisdom tends instead to credit U.S. postwar economic dominance to experience manufacturing military durables.
The historiography of the Second World War is littered with stylized facts which are either wrong or only partly true.
One is that the U.S. economy was almost completely demilitarized during the 1930s. This is largely true insofar as ground and air forces are concerned. It was not true for the Navy. As a former undersecretary of the Navy Roosevelt had a soft spot for sea power. So did important leaders in the legislature.
The two Vinson-Trammel Acts passed in the 1930s allowed the US to build up to treaty limits. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, U.S. naval power ranked only slightly behind that of the Royal Navy, and ahead of the Japanese (although not in the Pacific).
Moreover, the U.S. possessed an industrial infrastructure and an experienced workforce in both government and private shipyards that was capable of rapidly building multiple ships. Heinrich provides an excellent…
Economic history is, quite simply, my job: I write about it, I research it, and I’ve been teaching it for ten years at a small liberal arts college in New England. I’ve always felt that the best way to make sense of economic change is not by studying formal laws but by reading what past actors have left behind. Numbers and statistics are indispensable, but they acquire meaning only in relation to ideas and power. In any case, that’s what I take the books on this list to suggest. I think of these books—and others like them—as trusty companions. Perhaps you will, too.
I turn to this book to remind myself how good economic history should be written: by foregrounding the political stakes and by angling for compelling prose. In Tooze’s telling, when Nazi ideological rage met the grim realities of a global Depression, the result was the lethal gamble to conquer Germany’s way out of isolation.
It’s so instructive to watch Tooze adroitly move between narrative registers—absorbing, emphatic, mordant, even humorous—as he tackles this hair-raising topic. The thorniest subjects—foreign exchange controls and machine tools, forced labor, and racial war—come to life to awesome and awful effect.
"Masterful . . . [A] painstakingly researched, astonishingly erudite study...Tooze has added his name to the roll call of top-class scholars of Nazism." -Financial Times
An extraordinary mythology has grown up around the Third Reich that hovers over political and moral debate even today. Adam Tooze's controversial book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period to explore how Hitler's surprisingly prescient vision--ultimately hindered by Germany's limited resources and his own racial ideology--was to create a German super-state to dominate Europe and compete with what he saw as America's overwhelming power in a soon-to- be globalized world. The Wages of…
My mother wanted me to be a physician, but as a child I was very squeamish about human biology and knew that wasn't for me. In college I was exposed to economics and found it, and the policy debates about national health insurance, fascinating. So, maybe with my mother’s wishes in the back of my mind, I became a health economist. I was privileged to direct a large randomized trial called the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, which varied the cost of medical care to families. This project lasted more than a decade and got me so deep into the economics of health and medical care that I became a professor of health policy and management.
Eminently readable, this is a classic book by the doyen of American health economics that explains in non-technical terms the economics of health and medical care. It has been updated with several essays that Fuchs has published in the almost five decades since the book was first published.
Since the first edition of Who Shall Live? (1974), over 100,000 students, teachers, physicians, and general readers from more than a dozen fields have found this book to be a reader-friendly, authoritative introduction to economic concepts applied to health and medical care.Health care is by far the largest industry in the United States. It is three times larger than education and five times as large as national defense. In 2001, Americans spent over $12,500 per person for hospitals, physicians, drugs and other health care services and goods. Other high-income democracies spend one third less, enjoy three more years of life…
I consider FDR the greatest of all presidents for leading America with distinction in the domestic crisis of the Great Depression and the foreign crisis of World War 2 and creating the modern presidency that survives today in the essential form he established. I have written books on Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan during fifty years as a US history professor in UK universities. I always intended to write a book about how FDR reinvented the presidency that these Republicans inherited, something I finally did in ‘retirement’. My five chosen books explain the challenging times he faced and the leadership skills he displayed in meeting them.
This is a vivid retelling of the US production miracles that enabled America and its Allies to win World War 2. Instead of overwhelming readers with dry numbers, the book comes alive by focusing on the human dimension. Klein credits FDR for understanding that the US had to become the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ to win the war, while lionizing innovative industrialists and engineers who turned this vision into reality and the federal officials who cleared the way for their operations to succeed. He also highlights the struggles of the millions who endured disruption and discomfort in migrating to undertake war work far from their home regions. This is essential reading to understand the home front in America’s greatest foreign war.
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…
I am a historian of education and twentieth-century U.S. history. Public schooling has been transformative for me, opening up a world of opportunities, but I know many others are not nearly so lucky. This has shaped my interest in the history of public schooling, including its promise of democracy and opportunity and the too-often reality of the way it replicates and deepens social and economic inequalities. I think history helps us understand our world, including to see the roots of inequality we live with today and to think about how we might build a more equitable system.
I love this book because it takes what we largely take for granted—local property tax and the educational inequality it produces—and shows how and why this developed over time and whose interests it has served. While we have tended to assume that funding inequality is the unfortunate byproduct of a long attachment to localism, this book explores how, in California, the state moved from centralized and more equitable funding to more localized and unequal funding through the political lobbying of the elites who benefited.
Taking unequal funding seriously as a deliberate project and a cornerstone for other kinds of social and economic inequalities makes us rethink many aspects of educational inequality we live with today. This book consequently says profound things about the history of American education and educational inequality, past and present.
In Dividing the Public, Matthew Gardner Kelly takes aim at the racial and economic disparities that characterize public education funding in the United States. With California as his focus, Kelly illustrates that the use of local taxes to fund public education was never an inadvertent or de facto product of past practices, but an intentional decision adopted in place of well-known alternatives during the Progressive Era, against past precedent and principle in several states.
From efforts to convert expropriated Indigenous and Mexican land into common school funding in the 1850s, to reforms that directed state aid to expanding white suburbs…
I am a historian of international conflict who focuses on understanding the enemy. For most of my career, I have studied why we so often misread others, and how those misperceptions lead to war. The current crisis in Ukraine is just one more example of how the parties involved misunderstood each other. I believe that if we could improve this one ability, we would substantially lessen the likelihood, frequency, and severity of war.
This is certainly the nerdiest of my selections. It is simply a collection of analytical assessments from the sharpest minds to study Nazi Germany during WWII. The authors of these reports, most of them Jewish intellectual academics who fled the Third Reich, joined America’s embryonic intelligence community before the CIA existed. The documents show how their deep knowledge of German social forces enabled them to counter the more superficial analysis of military and political officials about Germany’s likely course. As I wrote in my own book, if America had only had comparable experts on Afghanistan, the war there might not have ended as it did.
During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School--Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer--worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time. These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler's regime and the Second World War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as…
I am a professor of neurology at the University of Cincinnati, interested in the many ways in which we acquire impairments in movements, in cognition, or in both. I have sought to measure these behaviors, quantify their responses to different pharmacological treatments, and determine how they inform the biology of the aging brain. In publications along the way, I have increasingly questioned how we classify neurological diseases and treat those affected.
This book explains the tight connection between Alzheimer’s disease and education, health, income, and environment, and why the rate of Alzheimer’s disease in the population actually decreased in the decades following the most important societal changes enacted after World War II. Social safety, environmental protections, and income inequality have had far greater impact than any of the pharmacological approaches ever attempted. The authors make the compelling case that brain health is intimately connected to societal health.
Have the social safety nets, environmental protections, and policies to redress wealth and income inequality enacted after World War II contributed to declining rates of dementia today-and how do we improve brain health in the future?
For decades, researchers have chased a pharmaceutical cure for memory loss. But despite the fact that no disease-modifying biotech treatments have emerged, new research suggests that dementia rates have actually declined in the United States and Western Europe over the last decade. Why is this happening? And what does it mean for brain health in the future?
