Allan Winkler is a professor emeritus of history at Miami University in Ohio. He is the author of The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945 (1978); Home Front, U.S.A.: America During World War II (1986); Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety About the Atom (1993); and Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Making of Modern America (2006). His most recent book is "To Everything There Is a Season": Pete Seeger and the Power of Song (2009).
This lecture, based on Winklder's short biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, describes FDR's life and New Deal and World War II efforts. Faced with crises – the Great Depression and later the Nazi threat – he changed the way Americans thought about the presidency and their government.