Postwar Waging Peace In Chicago Laura Mcenaney by Laura Mcenaney 9780812250558, 0812250559 instant download after payment.

In Postwar, Laura McEnaney plumbs the depths of this period to explore exactly what peace meant to a broad swath of civilians, including apartment dwellers, single women & housewives, newly freed Japanese American internees, African American migrants, & returning veterans. In her fine-grained social history of postwar Chicago, McEnaney puts ordinary working-class people at the center of her investigation.

What she finds is a working-class war liberalism--a conviction that the wartime state had taken things from people, & that the postwar era was about reclaiming those things with the state's help. McEnaney examines vernacular understandings of the state, exploring how people perceived & experienced government in their lives. 

For Chicago's working-class residents, the state was not clearly delineated. The local offices of federal agencies, along with organizations such as the Travelers Aid Society & other neighborhood welfare groups, all became what she calls the state in the neighborhood, an extension of government to serve an urban working class recovering from war. 

Just as they had made war, the urban working class had to make peace, & their requests for help, large & small, constituted early dialogues about the role of the state during peacetime.
Postwar examines peace as its own complex historical process, a passage from conflict to postconflict that contained human struggles & policy dilemmas that would shape later decades as fatefully as had the war.