Document from the year 2018 in the subject History – America, grade: 5.0, , language: English, abstract: The title of my book: America between Wars allowed me to present the most powerful country of the world from a different perspective.
In the aftermath of World War I, the “Great War, ” the nations of the world tended to retreat inside themselves, to lick their wounds and reorganize their economic and social structures. The United States, relatively untouched by the first world war, at least in comparison with the losses suffered by the European nations, also turned inward.
In America, the Roaring Twenties were a time of great excitement – bathtub gin, speakeasies, new dress styles, a revolution in manners and morals, the Harlem Renaissance, a golden age of sports, radios, movies, and a booming stock market. There were bad things too, the lawlessness generated by prohibition, the reactivation of the Ku Klux Klan, animosity between country and city, and a resurgence xenophobia that saw the United States slam its doors to most foreign immigration.
Toward the end of the decade came the great stock market crash which, although it was not the cause of the Depression, helped trigger a series of events that led to the worst economic slump in American history. Unemployment sky-jumped, production broke down, banks failed, farmers discovered that it cost more to produce food then they could sell it for, and suicides rose alarmingly.
Into such milieu came Franklin Delano Roosevelt, fifth cousin of progressive President Theodore Roosevelt, and a man who had suffered a serious personal tragedy when he contracted polio. He overcame his disease and was elected twice as governor of New York and came to Washington in 1933 ready to do battle with the forces of depression. Roosevelt’s New Deal was a huge experiment in government intervention in the economy, and although they did not end the Depression, Roosevelt’s policies gave hope to many and changed the relationship between the government and the people forever.
As the country struggled to pull itself out of the Depression, storm Clouds gathered, as missed militarists in Japan and fascist dictators in Germany and Mussolini once again set the world on a collision course with bloody war. Breaking out in 1937 in China in 1939 in Poland, the war eventually drag the United States and as the democracies struggled to maintain a free world. Victorious in the second world war, the United States emerged as the world’s superpower, its first atomic power, and a nation of unprecedented economic might.
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