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In recent years, the World War II homefront has become a fertile field for historical scholarship. For several decades after the war, historians wrote extensively about the New Deal and the Cold War but neglected the wartime homefront. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars began to fill that gap with a number of outstanding comprehensive accounts and many more specialized studies. As the United States celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the war in the 1990s, historians looked at the impact of the war even more closely than before, and we now have a rich collection of scholarship dealing with the entire wartime experience. The following are highlights of that scholarship, dealing with the themes appearing in this issue of the OAH Magazine of History, for students and teachers interested in pursuing these issues further.
Two recent books provide the best brief introduction to the war at home. Allan M. Winkler's Home Front, U.S.A.: America during World War II, 2d ed. (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2000) deals with the economic, social, and political effects of the struggle and argues that the war was a watershed that laid the framework for the postwar years. John W. Jeffries's Wartime America: The World War II Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996) likewise offers a clear overview of the changes that occurred but suggests that continuities with the past were equally important and argues that basic American values survived the conflict intact. Both of these books contain full bibliographies of all the recent scholarship.
Other books help till out the picture. William L. O'Neill's A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II (New York: The Free Press, 1993) offers a good overview of all sides of the struggle. The two best books from the 1970s, still useful today, are Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, 1941-1945 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1972); and John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). Polenberg provides an evenhanded and useful assessment of the important wartime developments. Blum includes a fuller sense of the culture and its constraints in his more extended account. Two other older works that are likewise still...