“Words alone cannot restore lost years”

As Americans unite to defeat the Coronavirus, here are five great books that cover how Americans on the home front united to achieve victory in World War II.

Olga Kucherenko is a specialist in the socio-cultural history of the Second World War with an interest in conflict-based propaganda, everyday life in wartime and allied relations.

Just a few months after Adolf Hitler came to power in Nazi Germany and a full six years before World War II, German university students carried out an “Action Against the Un-German Spirit” targeting authors ranging from Helen Keller and Ernest Hemingway to Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Their orchestrated book burnings across Germany would come to underscore German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine’s 19th century warning, “where one burns books, one soon burns people.

Adelaide Wisdom Benjamin is one of the many heroes you will come to know through her own words in Expressions of America.