Hailed by the Washington Post as "the one account of America in the 1920s against which all others must be measured," Frederick Lewis Allen's extraordinary social history takes readers back to a time of flappers and speakeasies, the first radio, unparalleled prosperity-and cataclysmic economic decline Beginning November 11, 1918, when President Woodrow Wilson declared the end of World War I in a letter to the American public, and continuing through...

It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression--only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand it. These people are at the heart of this reinterpretation of one of the most crucial events of the twentieth century. Author Shlaes presents the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans, and shows how through brave leadership they helped establish the steadfast...

"The Great Crash of 1929 profoundly disrupted the United States' confident march toward becoming the world's superpower. The breakneck growth of 1920s America--with its boom in automobiles, electricity, credit lines, radio, and movies--certainly presaged a serious recession by the decade's end, but not a depression. The totality of the collapse shocked the nation, and its duration scarred generations to come. In this lucid and fast-paced account of...

The New York Times–bestselling history of the first half of the twentieth century-five decades that transformed America-from the author of Only Yesterday.   During the first fifty years of the twentieth century, the United States saw two world wars, a devastating economic depression, and more social, political, and economic changes than in any other five-decade period before. Frederick Lewis Allen, former editor of Harper's magazine, recounts these...

"In the early 1920s, Benjamin Roth was a young lawyer fresh out of the army. He settled in Youngstown, Ohio, a booming Midwestern industrial town. Times were good - until the stock market crash of 1929. After nearly two years of economic crisis, it was clear that the heady prosperity of the Roaring Twenties would not return quickly." "As Roth began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to American economic life, he set out to record his impressions...

"Taming the Street tells the epic story of the FDR's battle to regulate Wall Street for the very first time in the wake of the Crash of 1929 that ushered in the Great Depression. Deeply reported and vividly told, it provides a trip back to a time when the power of concentrated wealth in America arguably exceeded that of the federal government. Roosevelt's campaign to curb the excesses of the market, end reckless speculation, and mitigate the disastrous...

"Selected bibliography": pages 207-210