Not since Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath has there been a family saga as powerful as Bucking the Sun or a family as compellingly strife-torn as the one at its center. Driven by drought from their Montana farm to "relief work" building the Fort Peck Dam, the Duff family spans the extremes of the times, from the eldest son Owen, who has made his way through college to an engineer's job on the dam to young Bruce, his antithesis, a risk-taker who works...

This bold new analysis of the New Deal dramatically revises our vision of the Roosevelt legacy — and of the new relation between government and business it made a central fact of American life. With impressive scholarship and narrative brio, Jordan A. Schwarz persuasively demonstrates that the New Deal's architects sought not merely to save an endangered American capitalism but to integrate economically underdeveloped regions of the nation within...

A portrait of the end of FDR's life shares insights into how he made his final policy decisions and pursued what mattered most to him, including the establishment of the United Nations, a reinvigoration of the New Deal, and a Jewish homeland in Palestine. "The first hundred days of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency are justly famous, a period of political action without equal in American history and still the standard by which we judge our presidents....

Think FDR was a great president? Think again.

The Great Depression and the New Deal—for generations, the collective American consciousness has believed that the former ruined the country and the latter saved it. Endless praise has been heaped upon President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for masterfully reining in the Depression's destructive effects and propping up the country on his New Deal platform. In fact, FDR has achieved mythical

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On October 29, 1929, better known as Black Tuesday, the stock market crashed, abruptly ending a decade of prosperity and catapulting the United States into the Great Depression, arguably the worst economic crisis the country has ever experienced. During the years that followed, until U.S. entry into World War II in 1941, unemployment was at an all-time high, hundreds of banks foreclosed, and a sense of hopelessness pervaded the nation. It was only...

In the early days of 1937, the Ohio River, swollen by heavy winter rains, began rising. And rising. And rising. By the time the waters crested, the Ohio and Mississippi had climbed to record heights. Nearly four hundred people had died, while a million more had run from their homes. The deluge caused more than half a billion dollars of damage at a time when the Great Depression still battered the nation.

Timed to coincide with the flood's seventy-fifth

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Two Depression-battered nations confronted destiny in 1932, going to the polls in their own way to anoint new leaders, to rescue their people from starvation and hopelessness. America would elect a Congress and a president—ebullient aristocrat Franklin Roosevelt or tarnished "Wonder Boy" Herbert Hoover. Decadent, divided Weimar Germany faced two rounds of bloody Reichstag elections and two presidential contests—doddering reactionary Paul...

"The Great Depression of the 1930s turned the lives of ordinary Americans upside down, leaving an indelible mark on the nation's psyche. The Great Depression: America in the 1930s is award-winning historian T.H. Watkins's lively political, economic, and cultural account of this age of hardship and hope." "This companion volume to the public television series The Great Depression tells the story of a decade of disaster, challenge, and change. It begins...

"The untold story of how FDR did the unthinkable to save the American economy. The American economy is strong in large part because nobody believes that America would ever default on its debt. Yet in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt did just that, when in a bid to pull the country out of depression, he depreciated the U.S. dollar in relation to gold, effectively annulling all debt contracts. American Default is the story of this forgotten chapter in America's...