Author: Joyce MerriamPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
Franklin D. Roosevelt's Policy Toward Poland, 1941-1945
Author: Joyce MerriamYalta
Author: S. M. PlokhyPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101189924
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 598
Book Description
A major new history of the eight days in February 1945 when FDR, Churchill, and Stalin decided the fate of the world Imagine you could eavesdrop on a dinner party with three of the most fascinating historical figures of all time. In this landmark book, a gifted Harvard historian puts you in the room with Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt as they meet at a climactic turning point in the war to hash out the terms of the peace. The ink wasn't dry when the recriminations began. The conservatives who hated Roosevelt's New Deal accused him of selling out. Was he too sick? Did he give too much in exchange for Stalin's promise to join the war against Japan? Could he have done better in Eastern Europe? Both Left and Right would blame Yalta for beginning the Cold War. Plokhy's conclusions, based on unprecedented archival research, are surprising. He goes against conventional wisdom-cemented during the Cold War- and argues that an ailing Roosevelt did better than we think. Much has been made of FDR's handling of the Depression; here we see him as wartime chief. Yalta is authoritative, original, vividly- written narrative history, and is sure to appeal to fans of Margaret MacMillan's bestseller Paris 1919.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945
Author: Robert DallekPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195097327
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 686
Book Description
Discusses the domestic pressure which influenced Roosevelt's foreign policy and American foreign relations.
The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945
Author: Joshua D. ZimmermanPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107014263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 473
Book Description
Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.
Rendezvous with Destiny
Author: Michael FullilovePublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101617829
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494
Book Description
The remarkable untold story of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the five extraordinary men he used to pull America into World War II In the dark days between Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt sent five remarkable men on dramatic and dangerous missions to Europe. The missions were highly unorthodox and they confounded and infuriated diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic. Their importance is little understood to this day. In fact, they were crucial to the course of the Second World War. The envoys were magnificent, unforgettable characters. First off the mark was Sumner Welles, the chilly, patrician under secretary of state, later ruined by his sexual misdemeanors, who was dispatched by FDR on a tour of European capitals in the spring of 1940. In summer of that year, after the fall of France, William “Wild Bill” Donovan—war hero and future spymaster—visited a lonely United Kingdom at the president’s behest to determine whether she could hold out against the Nazis. Donovan’s report helped convince FDR that Britain was worth backing. After he won an unprecedented third term in November 1940, Roosevelt threw a lifeline to the United Kingdom in the form of Lend-Lease and dispatched three men to help secure it. Harry Hopkins, the frail social worker and presidential confidant, was sent to explain Lend-Lease to Winston Churchill. Averell Harriman, a handsome, ambitious railroad heir, served as FDR’s man in London, expediting Lend-Lease aid and romancing Churchill’s daughter-in-law. Roosevelt even put to work his rumpled, charismatic opponent in the 1940 presidential election, Wendell Willkie, whose visit lifted British morale and won wary Americans over to the cause. Finally, in the aftermath of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Hopkins returned to London to confer with Churchill and traveled to Moscow to meet with Joseph Stalin. This final mission gave Roosevelt the confidence to bet on the Soviet Union. The envoys’ missions took them into the middle of the war and exposed them to the leading figures of the age. Taken together, they plot the arc of America’s trans¬formation from a divided and hesitant middle power into the global leader. At the center of everything, of course, was FDR himself, who moved his envoys around the globe with skill and élan. We often think of Harry S. Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and George F. Kennan as the authors of America’s global primacy in the second half of the twentieth century. But all their achievements were enabled by the earlier work of Roosevelt and his representatives, who took the United States into the war and, by defeating domestic isolationists and foreign enemies, into the world. In these two years, America turned. FDR and his envoys were responsible for the turn. Drawing on vast archival research, Rendezvous with Destiny is narrative history at its most delightful, stirring, and important.
The Most Unsordid Act
Author: Warren F. KimballPublisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142143105X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Book Description
Originally published in 1969. In The Most Unsordid Act, Warren Kimball provides a history of the Lend-Lease idea. The genesis and development of the Lend-Lease idea, although spanning less than two years, offers a subject of the broadest significance for major questions of democratic government and society. The story begins with the United States' growing recognition of the British monetary and gold shortage and ends with the passage of the Lend-Lease Act and the American commitment that it involved. Dr. Kimball's narrative—chronological, detailed, and dramatic—includes analyses of the domestic and international concerns on both sides of the Atlantic and of the roles of the leading protagonists: President F. D. Roosevelt and Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, as well as Stimson, Hull, Churchill, and key British representatives. He also examines the possibility that Lend-Lease was designed to benefit the American economy at Britain's expense. A central question animates Kimball's account: How could a president who recognized the ultimate threat of Nazi Germany, but shared his nation's desire to avoid war, find a way to help an ally? The portrait of Roosevelt that emerges is instructive in view of revisionist histories that present him as a Machiavellian figure disingenuously leading his country to war. Kimball sees him, rather, as an essentially domestic president whose experiences and interests evolved from national concerns—as a man unschooled in international affairs, eager to avoid confrontation with his congressional opposition, wary of the British penchant for power politics, given to procrastination when faced with difficult problems, and anxious to avoid full-scale war. Yet, the administration's legislative strategy and the debate over the Lend-Lease Act clearly demonstrated that the president, his closest advisers, and the Congress were aware that the legislation would inevitably mean war with Germany. Based on such sources as the diaries of Morgenthau, the State Department Archives, Foreign Economic Administration records, the Stimson papers, and interviews with participants, this study provides insights that raise central questions about the functioning of the American system of government.
FDR and the Jews
Author: Richard BreitmanPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674073673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410
Book Description
Nearly seventy-five years after World War II, a contentious debate lingers over whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned his back on the Jews of Hitler's Europe. Defenders claim that FDR saved millions of potential victims by defeating Nazi Germany. Others revile him as morally indifferent and indict him for keeping America's gates closed to Jewish refugees and failing to bomb Auschwitz's gas chambers. In an extensive examination of this impassioned debate, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman find that the president was neither savior nor bystander. In FDR and the Jews, they draw upon many new primary sources to offer an intriguing portrait of a consummate politician-compassionate but also pragmatic-struggling with opposing priorities under perilous conditions. For most of his presidency Roosevelt indeed did little to aid the imperiled Jews of Europe. He put domestic policy priorities ahead of helping Jews and deferred to others' fears of an anti-Semitic backlash. Yet he also acted decisively at times to rescue Jews, often withstanding contrary pressures from his advisers and the American public. Even Jewish citizens who petitioned the president could not agree on how best to aid their co-religionists abroad. Though his actions may seem inadequate in retrospect, the authors bring to light a concerned leader whose efforts on behalf of Jews were far greater than those of any other world figure. His moral position was tempered by the political realities of depression and war, a conflict all too familiar to American politicians in the twenty-first century.
Debating Franklin D. Roosevelt's Foreign Policies, 1933–1945
Author: Justus D. DoeneckePublisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742576353
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Elected an unprecedented four times to the presidency, Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States through some of the most dramatic and trying foreign and domestic episodes in its history. Coming to power in the throws of a crippling depression, Roosevelt quickly found himself having to juggle the need for tremendous domestic revitalization in a world menaced by burgeoning aggressor states. In Debating Franklin D. Roosevelt's Foreign Policies, noted historians Justus D. Doenecke and Mark A. Stoler offer differing perspectives on the Roosevelt years, finding disparate meanings from common data. Finding Roosevelt astute at choosing the most effective option of those available, Stoler generally defends FDR's policies against their traditional critics. Conversely, Doenecke emphasizes a dangerous shallowness and superficiality in FDR's approach to foreign affairs, particularly in his first two terms. The contrary viewpoints of the authors, supplemented by carefully chosen documents, provide an ideal introduction allowing readers to examine the issues and draw their own conclusions about Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy.
Roosevelt and Stalin
Author: Susan ButlerPublisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101874627
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 642
Book Description
A hugely important book that solely and fully explores for the first time the complex partnership during World War II between FDR and Stalin, by the editor of My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin (“History owes a debt to Susan Butler for the collection and annotation of these exchanges”—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr). Making use of previously classified materials from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, and the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, as well as the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and three hundred hot war messages between Roosevelt and Stalin, Butler tells the story of how the leader of the capitalist world and the leader of the Communist world became more than allies of convenience during World War II. Butler reassess in-depth how the two men became partners, how they shared the same outlook for the postwar world, and how they formed an uneasy but deep friendship, shaping the world’s political stage from the war to the decades leading up to and into the new century. Roosevelt and Stalin tells of the first face-to-face meetings of the two leaders over four days in December 1943 at Tehran, in which the Allies focused on the next phases of the war against the Axis Powers in Europe and Asia; of Stalin’s agreement to launch another major offensive on the Eastern Front; and of his agreement to declare war against Japan following the Allied victory over Germany. Butler writes of the weeklong meeting at Yalta in February of 1945, two months before Roosevelt’s death, where the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany was agreed on and postwar Europe was reorganized, and where Stalin agreed to participate in Roosevelt’s vision of the United Nations. The book makes clear that Roosevelt worked hard to win Stalin over, pursuing the Russian leader, always holding out the promise that Roosevelt’s own ideas were the best bet for the future peace and security of Russia; however, Stalin was not at all sure that Roosevelt’s concept of a world organization, even with police powers, would be enough to keep Germany from starting a third world war, but we see how Stalin’s view of Roosevelt evolved, how he began to see FDR as the key to a peaceful world. Butler’s book is the first to show how FDR pushed Stalin to reinstate religion in the Soviet Union, which he did in 1943; how J. Edgar Hoover derailed the U.S.-planned establishment of an OSS intelligence mission in Moscow and a Soviet counterpart in America before the 1944 election; and that Roosevelt had wanted to involve Stalin in the testing of the atomic bomb at Alamogardo, New Mexico. We see how Roosevelt’s death deeply affected Stalin. Averell Harriman, American ambassador to the Soviet Union, reported that the Russian premier was “more disturbed than I had ever seen him,” and said to Harriman, “President Roosevelt has died but his cause must live on. We shall support President Truman with all our forces and all our will.” And the author explores how Churchill’s—and Truman’s—mutual mistrust and provocation of Stalin resulted in the Cold War. A fascinating, revelatory portrait of this crucial, world-changing partnership.
Back Door to War
Author: Charles Callan TansillPublisher: Ostara Publications
ISBN: 9781684546138
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 694
Book Description
Charles Callan Tansill, America's diplomatic historian, convincingly argues that Franklin Roosevelt wished to involve the United States in World War II. When his efforts appeared to come to naught, Roosevelt provoked Japan into an attack on American territory, and so doing enter the war through the "back door".