In this concise and lively volume, Ronald Edsforth presents a fresh synthesis of the most critical years in twentieth-century American history. The book describes the collapse of American capitalism in the early 1930s, and the subsequent remaking of the US economy during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency. It is written for a new generation of readers for whom the Great Depression is a distant historical event.

Ronald W. Edsforth is Visiting Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College. He has served as Chief Historical Consultant on the PBS documentary America on Wheels, and is the author of Class Conflict and Cultural Consensus: The Making of a Mass Consumer Society in Flint, (Michigan, 1986). His other publications include Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America (ed., with Larry Bennett, 1991), and Autowork (ed., with Robert Asher, 1995).