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In the book "Wartime America: The World War II Homefront", John W. Jeffries discusses the effect of war on the American people and country. The book describes three effects of the war. First, the War was a turning point for the country and the world, in many respects, and that life since the war has been quite unlike life before the war. Secondly, America's position in the world changed social realities, bringing a new respect for and concern with racial and ethnic equity, for example. Finally, he notes that though the war was devastating to much of Europe, it also created an economic boom for the United States.

In this brief, well-crafted work University of Maryland, Baltimore County historian John W. Jeffries presents a sophisticated, thoughtful overview of the revisionist work of the last quarter century on the home front, while insisting that traditional emphasis on continuity in business-government relations, racial and ethnic tension, and national partisan politics should not be overlooked.

Major works dealing with the home front effort implicitly have presented contrasting interpretations. In the first full-length history of the home front experience, Richard Polenberg wrote that "World War II radically altered the character of American society and challenged its most durable values," a view confirmed the following year by Geoffrey Perrett, who argued that "the war years provided the last great collective social experience in the country's history." Yet in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years, the interpretive focus began a subtle but significant shift, beginning with John Morton Blum's V Was for Victory, which asserted that "the wartime experience of Americans, nurtured in their culture and expressed in their politics, shaped American expectations about the postwar period at home and abroad," while Blum's Yale University student Allan Winkler wrote that Americans "confronted shifting social and political issues as they...