The United States of America is a country that has been forged by war, prosperity,

calamity, slavery, discrimination, ascent, decline and every describing word in between. It’s rich,
yet comparatively short, history has been able to fill a breadth of written pages but no other event
has shaped it’s story in such a dramatic way as that of its time before, during and after its
involvement in World War II. At the dawn of the war the U.S. was mired in economic
desperation and trying to regain traction into becoming a stable nation. Its entry into the war was
late and fraught with isolationism. Its outcome was victorious and the U.S emerged out of the
wake of the war as a superpower and had ripped into a new era of economic prosperity that
changed the landscape of the nation.

Before World War II the United States had seen a time in the 1920’s that was prosperous
and roaring, as some would describe it. People experienced wealth in ways that had not seen it
before. Credit was loosely given to people who wanted, wages had been increasing and
consumer goods were ready and available. Yet in all of the prosperity many economic problems
had been unchecked leading to the crash of the stock market in 1929 which resulted in “ten
billion dollars in investments (roughly equivalent to about $100 billion today) disappeared in a
matter of hours.” (The American Yawp) This left America in a place of high unemployment and
poverty, Americans who could not afford proper housing and lived in shanty towns also known
was hoovervilles, veterans of World War I who marched on the capital to ask repayment for their
war efforts and to cap it off there was a massive migration west of those who over-farmed the
land in the south and midwest. Even through the efforts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his
New Deal America was not in a place of health.

War had emerged in Europe and the Pacific and the United States had continued to hold
an isolationist position in their involvement in it. They did not want to get dragged into another
miserable war such as World War I that did not seem to produce any lasting fruits. The United
States held their isolation from the war even though American civilian ships had been sank in the
Atlantic that raised threats that they could go to war. War was not eminent to the United States
until “Japanese military planners hoped to destroy enough battleships and aircraft carriers to
cripple American naval power for years,” (The American Yawp) when they had bombed Pearl
Harbor in 1941. Within a week the United States found itself gearing up for war overseas.
Britain, America and Russia had turned the tide of the war and had overtaken Germany and
ended the war. It was at this time “when it ended, the United States found itself alone as the
world’s greatest superpower. Armed with the world’s greatest economy, it looked forward to the
fruits of a prosperous consumers’ economy.” (The American Yawp) We had fought in a war that
we did not want to be involved in and ended up in a better position than we had before.

At the end of World War II some began to see similarities in what could happen to the
economy as it had happened in the first war, a economic depression. Instead there were
institutions in place such as the G.I. Bill that allowed service people to receive benefits from the
government and not flood the job market with millions of returning veterans. Many were also
allowed to go to university and technical college which sparked an enormous growth in those
who would participate in higher education.
 After World War II marked one of the most dramatic times of economic growth in
American history. It was the “government spending during World War II pushed the United
States out of the Depression and into an economic boom.” (The American Yawp) An upward
shift in the American economy would result in the naming of this time as the “Affluent Society”
which was marked by the suburban sprawl, the enormous consumption of consumer goods, and a
way of life that America had never before seen. World War II had put America in such a place to
have upward mobility like never before.

There has never been an event in history such as World War II that has shaped and
changed the course of America after 1877. The United States had been in an era of depression
that left many people without jobs and homes to live. The depression had left a curtain of doubt
over whether or not America would rise again like it had in the passed. It was not until the entry
of the United States into the second World War that shook the American economy back from pits
that it had been. As the war came to a close and the American people on the side of victory there
was a total change in the economic landscape of the nation. The American people regain wealth
and prosperity like never before and the war had left them as the worlds only superpower and a
future that was bright and ascending.

Works Cited

The American Yawp. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.americanyawp.com/.

Reflection

The aftermath of World War II is far reaching and relevant to this day. It has effected a broad
sphere of politics and society from the foreign policy that we as a nation create and how we view
and interact with other nations to the type of movies and themes that we create to glorify the idea
of World War II. The immensity of World War II has shaped events that conspired over the last
70 years and will continue to shape world wide society in the future.

I have seen World War II continue to influence society today in the form of theatrical portrayals
in the movie theatre. The characters of Captain America and movies such as Inglorious Bastards
and most recently Jo Jo Rabbit there is still money to be made by recreating ideas of World War
II. People still believe that this event is worth revisiting and remembering what had conspired,
whether it be a fictional retelling, we continue to engage with this theme.

World War II has shaped how I see the world in many ways. When I think about the quantity for
people (approx. 80 million) who died during the war I wonder how humans can be so deeply at
odds with one another. Thinking about the quantity of people who died in this war makes me
wonder what rifts there have to been in culture and society to feel like war is the only option for
forward movements. I look for similarities in our time with pre-WWII time in the way that I and
the society that I live thinks. I am curious if we are trending in any of the same ways, whether it
be how we consume media and what the media is telling us about the world around us and how
we think of other people groups and if we see them as less than ourselves.

Another way that WWII has shaped how I see the world is in regard to the economic successes
that we have been through in the past fews decades. We were aloud to flourish in times after the
war and other countries did not. Some countries have yet to be developed industrially and I
believe that we had been given the economic upper hand that aloud the US to use and abuse
many of these other countries that did not experience growth during the time that we did. We
have been able to use inexpensive labor in other countries such as China and Mexico due in part
to the economic successes that separated us from them after war time.

WWII is connected to other principles that I have learn in other general education courses and
especially with my World Geography 1300 class. In this class we surveyed every country in the
world and various aspects of their geography and how that defines them. Many times during this
class we would look at European countries and see how their recent history has been informed by
WWII. Whether it be their physical bounders or the political structures, all countries in this
region have a history that has been affected by this war. It was informative to hear how a country
was affected by this war from a different perspective than a history class that focused on how the
US was affected by their involvement in the War.