LibGuides: World War II History: Books

Recent Publications

American Working Women in World War II by Lynn Dumenil American Working Women in World War II introduces students to American women's experiences in defense work during World War II, focusing on the challenges they faced in male-dominated factories and the military, as well as their struggle to juggle work with expectations at home. An introductory essay and a rich array of primary sources--including firsthand accounts of women from diverse backgrounds, cartoons, photographs, and magazine articles--arranged in thematic chapters provides a lens through which to examine the history of women, gender, sexuality, labor, race, and ethnicity during this period, as well as the ways in which women's participation in the war effort may have contributed toward the civil rights movement of the 1950s and the feminist movement of the 1960s. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography further enrich this work. Available in print and e-book formats.
ISBN: 9781319159559
Publication Date: 2019-10-25
Colorado Women in World War II by Gail M. Beaton Four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Mildred McClellan Melville, a member of the Denver Woman's Press Club, predicted that war would come for the United States and that its long arm would reach into the lives of all Americans. And reach it did. Colorado women from every corner of the state enlisted in the military, joined the workforce, and volunteered on the home front. As military women, they served as nurses and in hundreds of noncombat positions. In defense plants they riveted steel, made bullets, inspected bombs, operated cranes, and stored projectiles. They hosted USO canteens, nursed in civilian hospitals, donated blood, drove Red Cross vehicles, and led scrap drives; and they processed hundreds of thousands of forms and reports. Whether or not they worked outside the home, they wholeheartedly participated in a kaleidoscope of activities to support the war effort. In Colorado Women in World War II Gail M. Beaton interweaves nearly eighty oral histories--including interviews, historical studies, newspaper accounts, and organizational records--and historical photographs (many from the interviewees themselves) to shed light on women's participation in the war, exploring the dangers and triumphs they felt, the nature of their work, and the lasting ways in which the war influenced their lives. Beaton offers a new perspective on World War II--views from field hospitals, small steel companies, ammunition plants, college classrooms, and sugar beet fields--giving a rare look at how the war profoundly transformed the women of this state and will be a compelling new resource for readers, scholars, and students interested in Colorado history and women's roles in World War II.
ISBN: 9781646420322
Publication Date: 2020-08-24
Japanese-American Relocation in World War II by Roger W. Lotchin In this revisionist history of the United States government relocation of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, Roger W. Lotchin challenges the prevailing notion that racism was the cause of the creation of these centers. After unpacking the origins and meanings of American attitudes toward the Japanese-Americans, Lotchin then shows that Japanese relocation was a consequence of nationalism rather than racism. Lotchin also explores the conditions in the relocation centers and the experiences of those who lived there, with discussions on health, religion, recreation, economics, consumerism, and theater. He honors those affected by uncovering the complexity of how and why their relocation happened, and makes it clear that most Japanese-Americans never went to a relocation center. Written by a specialist in US home front studies, this book will be required reading for scholars and students of the American home front during World War II, Japanese relocation, and the history of Japanese immigrants in America.
ISBN: 9781108419291
Publication Date: 2018-05-03
World War II and American Racial Politics by Steven White World War II played an important role in the trajectory of race and American political development, but the War's effects were much more complex than many assume. Steven White offers an extensive analysis of rarely utilized survey data and archival evidence to assess white racial attitudes and the executive branch response to civil rights advocacy. He finds that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the white mass public's racial policy attitudes largely did not liberalize during the war against Nazi Germany. In this context, advocates turned their attention to the possibility of unilateral action by the president, emphasizing a wartime civil rights agenda focused on discrimination in the defense industry and segregation in the military. This book offers a reinterpretation of this critical period in American political development, as well as implications for the theoretical relationship between war and the inclusion of marginalized groups in democratic societies.
ISBN: 9781108427630
Publication Date: 2019-07-11
World War II POW Camps of Wyoming by Cheryl O'Brien Wyoming's nineteen prisoner of war camps held several thousand incarcerated Italian and German prisoners during World War II. Historical records, photographs and personal stories shared by camp residents reveal details about this little-known part of the state's history. Local agricultural and timber industries utilized POW labor, while positive relationships developed between the camp's civilian area residents and prisoners. Author Cheryl O'Brien recounts the experiences of the prisoners and the intriguing story of how U.S. military personnel, prisoners and residents-in spite of their differences-collaborated to cope with the challenges of life in a POW camp.
ISBN: 9781467143820
Publication Date: 2019-10-28

Books Used in Courses

Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning "In the early hours of July 13, 1942, the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German Order Police, entered the Polish Village of Jozefow. They had arrived in Poland less than three weeks before, most of them recently drafted family men too old for combat service--workers, artisans, salesmen, and clerks. By nightfall, they had rounded up Jozefow's 1,800 Jews, selected several hundred men as "work Jews," and shot the rest--that is, some 1,500 women, children, and old people." "Most of these overage, rear-echelon reserve policemen had grown to maturity in the port city of Hamburg in pre-Hitler Germany and were neither committed Nazis nor racial fanatics. Nevertheless, in the sixteen months from the Jozefow massacre to the brutal Erntefest ("harvest festival") slaughter of November 1943, these average men participated in the direct shooting deaths of at least 38,000 Jews and the deportation to Treblinka's gas chambers of 45,000 more--a total body count of 83,000 for a unit of less than 500 men." "Drawing on postwar interrogations of 210 former members of the battalion, Christopher Browning lets them speak for themselves about their contribution to the Final Solution--what they did, what they thought, how they rationalized their behavior (one man would shoot only infants and children, to "release" them from their misery). In a sobering conclusion, Browning suggests that these good Germans were acting less out of deference to authority or fear of punishment than from motives as insidious as they are common: careerism and peer pressure. With its unflinching reconstruction of the battalion's murderous record and its painstaking attention to the social background and actions of individual men, this unique account offers some of the most powerful and disturbing evidence to date of the ordinary human capacity for extraordinary inhumanity."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 0060190132
Publication Date: 1992-03-01
Hitler's first hundred days : when Germans embraced the Third Reich by Peter Fritzsche ntroduction. Quarter past eleven, one hundred days, a thousand years -- "Crisis, if you please" -- Mystery tour -- Assault -- The "Communist beast" -- The German spring -- "Your Jewish grandmother" -- The administration of life -- "This enormous planet" -- The one hundred days -- A postscript and acknowledgments.
Call Number: 1145278244
ISBN: 1541619404
Publication Date: 2020
The Nazi Conscience by Claudia Koonz The Nazi conscience is not an oxymoron. In fact, the perpetrators of genocide had a powerful sense of right and wrong, based on civic values that exalted the moral righteousness of the ethnic community and denounced outsiders.
ISBN: 0674011724
Publication Date: 2003-11-26
War and Genocide by Doris L. Bergen In examining one of the defining events of the twentieth century, Doris L. Bergen situates the Holocaust in its historical, political, social, cultural, and military contexts. Unlike many other treatments of the Holocaust, this revised, third edition discusses not only the persecution of the Jews, but also other segments of society victimized by the Nazis: Roma, homosexuals, Poles, Soviet POWs, the disabled, and other groups deemed undesirable. In clear and eloquent prose, Bergen explores the two interconnected goals that drove the Nazi German program of conquest and genocide--purification of the so-called Aryan race and expansion of its living space--and discusses how these goals affected the course of World War II. Including firsthand accounts from perpetrators, victims, and eyewitnesses, her book is immediate, human, and eminently readable.
ISBN: 9781442242272
Publication Date: 2016-03-10
The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton From the author ofVichy France,a fascinating, authoritative history of fascism in all its manifestations, and how and why it took hold in certain countries and not in others. Whatisfascism? Many authors have proposed succinct but abstract definitions. Robert O. Paxton prefers to start with concrete historical experience. He focuses more on what fascists did than on what they said. Their first uniformed bands beat up “enemies of the nation,” such as communists and foreign immigrants, during the tense days after 1918 when the liberal democracies of Europe were struggling with the aftershocks of World War I. Fascist parties could not approach power, however, without the complicity of conservatives willing to sacrifice the rule of law for security. Paxton makes clear the sequence of steps by which fascists and conservatives together formed regimes in Italy and Germany, and why fascists remained out of power elsewhere. Fascist regimes were strained alliances. While fascist parties had broad political leeway, conservatives preserved many social and economic privileges. Goals of forced national unity, purity, and expansion, accompanied by propaganda-driven public excitement, held the mixture together. War opened opportunities for fascist extremists to pursue these goals to the point of genocide. Paxton shows how these opportunities manifested themselves differently in France, in Britain, in the Low Countries, and in Eastern Europe–and yet failed to achieve supreme power. He goes on to examine whether fascism can exist outside the specific early-twentieth-century European setting in which it emerged, and whether it can reappear today. This groundbreaking book, based on a lifetime of research, will have a lasting impact on our understanding of twentieth-century history.
ISBN: 1400040949
Publication Date: 2004-03-23

Historical Books

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer; Ron Rosenbaum (Introduction by) The fiftieth anniversary edition of the National Book Award-winning bestseller that is the definitive study of Adolf Hitler, the rise of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and World War II. This special edition now features a new introduction by Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler and How the End Begins. No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich. When the bitter war was over, and before the Nazis could destroy their files, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced an almost hour-by-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolph Hitler. This record included the testimony of Nazi leaders and of concentration camp inmates, the diaries of officials, transcripts of secret conferences, army orders, private letters--all the vast paperwork behind Hitler's drive to conquer the world. The famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting through this massive documentation. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind. Here is the complete story of Hitler's empire, one of the most important stories ever told, written by one of the men best equipped to write it. This worldwide bestseller has been acclaimed as the definitive book on Nazi Germany; it is a classic work.
ISBN: 1451642598
Publication Date: 2011-10-11
The Nazi Dictatorship by Ian Kershaw The Nazi Dictatorship has become the classic exploration of the complex issues historians face when they interpret the Third Reich. Ian Kershaw synthesizes and evaluates this complex historiography, looking at the major themes and debates relating to Nazism and drawing widely on the findingsof a great deal of research, in particular by German scholars, which is not available in English. He describes key interpretational problems, outlines the approaches taken by various historians, and then provides clear and up-to-date evaluations of their positions. This new edition reflects currentconcerns and fresh research. It contains substantial revisions to the chapter on Hitler and the Jews and to the survey of recent historical work, particularly with respect to the 'Goldhagen phenomenon.' Anyone with an interest in modern European history will find this volume invaluable.
ISBN: 034049008X
Publication Date: 1989-03-01
Inside the Third Reich: memoirs by Albert Speer ; translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston Inside the Third Reich is a memoir written by Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments from 1942 to 1945, serving as Adolf Hitler's main architect before this period. It is considered to be one of the most detailed descriptions of the inner workings and leadership of Nazi Germany but is controversial because of Speer's lack of discussion of Nazi atrocities and questions regarding his degree of awareness or involvement with them
Call Number: DD247 S63 A313 1970
Publication Date: 1970