Planning the Home Front – Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run (Historical Studies of Urban America) - Hardcover

Peterson, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022602542X ISBN 13: 9780226025421

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2013

Synopsis

Before Franklin Roosevelt declared December 7 to be a "date which will live in infamy"; before American soldiers landed on D-day; before the B-17s, B-24s, and B-29s roared over Europe and Asia, there was Willow Run. Located twenty-five miles west of Detroit, the bomber plant at Willow Run and the community that grew up around it attracted tens of thousands of workers from across the United States during World War II. Together, they helped build the nation's "arsenal of democracy," but Willow Run also became the site of repeated political conflicts over how to build suburbia while mobilizing for total war. In "Planning the Home Front", Sarah Jo Peterson offers readers a portrait of the American people - industrialists, labor leaders, federal officials, municipal leaders, social reformers, and industrial workers and their families - that lays bare the foundations of community, the high costs of racism, and the tangled process of negotiation between New Deal visionaries and wartime planners. By tying the history of suburbanization to that of the home front, Peterson uncovers how the United States planned and built industrial regions in the pursuit of war, setting the stage for the suburban explosion that would change the American landscape when the war was won.

About this title

About the Author

Sarah Jo Peterson is an independent scholar with over twenty years of experience in urban planning.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022602542X
• ISBN 13: 9780226025421
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336