Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945

Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 is a 1999 nonfiction book by the American historian David M. Kennedy. Published as part of the Oxford History of the United States, Freedom from Fear covers the history of the United States during the Great Depression and World War II. It won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History.

Development

Book publisher Oxford University Press produces "Oxford histories", a line of book series usually intended to broadly synthesize historical topics. In 1961, historians Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward began co-editing the Oxford History of the United States. Their goal for the series was to produce a line of academically credible books that non-academic audiences would also find readable, and The Baltimore Sun anticipated the series would be affordable for "the family budget". Hofstadter died in 1970, before the series published any books. The press publicly announced in 1970 that the Oxford History of the United States series was forthcoming and that a series volume about the New Deal would be written by historian Ernest R. May.

By 1982, when the series published its first volume—The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789—and issued another list of projected titles with their authors, historian David M. Kennedy had replaced May. At the time, Kennedy was a professor of history at Stanford University and had authored the 1980 Over Here: The First World War and American Society. Kennedy's own parents had lived through the Great Depression.