"Lynn Dumenil brings a fresh interpretation to a dramatic, important, and misunderstood decade. As her lively work makes clear, changing values brought an end to the repressive Victorian era; urban liberalism emerged; the federal bureaucracy was expanded; pluralism became increasingly important to America's heterogeneous society; and different religious, ethnic, and cultural groups encountered the homogenizing force of a powerful mass-consumer culture."--Book...

Amid the deprivation and despair of the Great Depression, Shirley Temple radiated optimism and plucky good cheer that lifted the spirits of millions and shaped their collective character for generations to come. John F. Kasson shows how the most famous, adored, imitated and commodified child in the world astonished movie goers, created a new international culture of celebrity and revolutionized the role of children as consumers.

Discusses the fashions, fads, politics, advances in medicine and technology, people, and world issues that made the 1940s a unique time in American and world history.

Dancing in the Dark shows how our worst economic crisis, as it eroded American individualism and punctured the American dream, produced in the 1930s some of the greatest writing, photography, and mass entertainment ever seen in this country.

"A companion resource to the 1940 Census just released by the US National Archives, This is Who We Were, provides the reader with a deeper understanding of what life was like in America in 1940 and how it compares statistically to life today. Using both original material from the 1940 Census (reprinted here in a different color), readers will find richly-illustrated Personal Profiles, Economic Data, and Current Events to give meaning and depth to...