War and Progress

Book excerpt: This is an account of how the daily lives of ordinary peoples were changed, profoundly and permanently, by these three momentous decades 1914-1945. Often depicted in negative terms Peter Dewey finds a much more positive pattern in the wealth of evidence he lays before us. His is a story of economic achievement, and the emergence of a new sense of social community in the nation, rather than a saga of disenchantment and decline.