Author Archives: the_starry_messenger

American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland

Bibliographic Details Author: Robert O. Self Publisher: Princeton University Press Year: 2003 Thesis Statement Robert O. Self argues that the postwar urban crisis in Oakland, California, was not a natural or inevitable consequence of deindustrialization, white flight, or federal policy … Continue reading →

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The Darkest Year: The American Home Front, 1943–1944

Bibliographic Details Author: William K. Klingaman Publisher: St. Martin’s Press Year: 2008 Genre: Narrative social history of the American home front during World War II Thesis Statement William K. Klingaman argues that 1943–1944 was not simply a triumphant prelude to … Continue reading →

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V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II

Bibliographic Details Author: John Morton Blum Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Year: 1976 Awards: Bancroft Prize Finalist; widely regarded as a foundational text in the cultural history of the American home front Thesis Statement John Morton Blum argues that American participation … Continue reading →

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V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II

Bibliographic Details Author: John Morton Blum Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Year: 1976 Thesis Statement John Morton Blum argues that American participation in the Second World War functioned less as an ideological crusade than as a vast exercise in national self-interested … Continue reading →

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The Second World War and the Transformation of the American Home Front: A Review of V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II

Bibliographic Details Author: John Morton Blum Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Year: 1976 Pages: 372 Thesis Statement John Morton Blum’s V Was for Victory argues that World War II functioned as a powerful engine of cultural and political transformation on the … Continue reading →

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The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in Old New York

Bibliographic Details Authors: Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz Publisher: Oxford University Press Year: 1994 Pages: 240 Series: Not part of a series Thesis Statement Johnson and Wilentz argue that the bizarre story of Robert Matthews, who in 1832 proclaimed … Continue reading →

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The War to End All Wars: The American Experience in World War I

Bibliographic Details Author: David M. Kennedy Publisher: Oxford University Press Year: 2004 Thesis Statement David M. Kennedy argues that American participation in World War I was a transformative but deeply contradictory episode that simultaneously expanded the federal government’s power, accelerated … Continue reading →

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Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

Bibliographic Details Author: Frederick Lewis Allen Publisher: Harper & Brothers Year: 1931 Thesis Statement Frederick Lewis Allen argues that the decade of the 1920s represented a profound and often disorienting rupture in American life—a period in which postwar disillusionment, unprecedented … Continue reading →

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The Last Great War: A History of World War I and Its Aftermath

Bibliographic Details Author: David Stevenson Publisher: Oxford University Press Year: 2024 Thesis Statement David Stevenson argues that the First World War was not merely a catastrophic rupture in European affairs but a totalizing event whose military, economic, and ideological aftershocks … Continue reading →

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The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

Bibliographic Details Author: Isabel Wilkerson Publisher: Random House Year: 2010 Pages: 640 Awards: National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction; Heartland Prize; Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Mark Lynton History Prize Thesis Statement Isabel Wilkerson argues that the Great Migration of African … Continue reading →

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