American Decades Primary Sources: 1940-1949

The United States of the 1940s marked the beginnings of significant social and political change. Men were shipped off to fight in World War II, and women entered the workforce in larger numbers than ever before to hold down the homefront, earning a taste of what it meant to be independent. African Americans fought beside their white counterparts in the war and returned home unwilling to accept the inequality under which theyd lived for so long. The United States ushered in the nuclear age with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also solidified its role as an international leader by helping to rebuild Europe and Japan under the Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union --once an ally -- became a feared enemy, and Americans looked for communists in their midst while the U.S. government shifted its policies from world war to Cold War. But while the government prepared to fight the communists, the public enjoyed the offerings of the first supermarkets.

The following documents are just a sampling of the offerings available in this volume: The Life of John Brown, No. 17, painting by Jacob LawrenceLinus Paulings research notebooksPhotographs of supermarkets in the 1940sWorld War II editorial cartoons by Dr. Seuss Richard Wrights Blues, review of Wrights novel, Black Boy, by Ralph EllisonFarewell to Manzanar and A Teacher at Topaz memoirs of teachers in Japanese-American internment