Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War

David M. Kennedy's Freedom from Fear covers the sixteen years, 1929 to 1945, that took the United States from the Wall Street crash into the ashes of the Second World War, treating the Depression and the war as a single connected ordeal rather than two separate stories. Kennedy follows Franklin Roosevelt's improvised response to the Depression, the alphabet of New Deal agencies built to put people back to work and stabilize a collapsed banking system, and the political fights those programs provoked in Congress and the courts.

The book then carries the same country into global war, following mobilization on a scale the United States had never attempted, the shift of an entire industrial economy to war production, and the military campaigns in Europe and the Pacific that Kennedy folds into his account of how the war remade American society at home as much as it reshaped the world abroad. He gives real attention to the era's ordinary experience, families stretched by unemployment and later by rationing and separation, alongside the policy decisions made in Washington.

Kennedy writes as a volume of the Oxford History of the United States, a series built for readers who want a single authoritative account of a defined era rather than a narrow monograph, and reading the book means following a genuinely comprehensive account that treats economics, politics and daily life as inseparable. It suits a reader who wants the Depression and the war explained as one continuous national experience rather than as two chapters usually taught apart.