Appelbaum says this inadvertently "democratized the pleasures of reading. Thanks to cheap wartime paperbacks, books became "as popular as pin-up girls" to soldiers stationed in remote locales like Dutch New Guinea in the Pacific. Due to its seizure of rubber plantations in Southeast Asia, Japan was basically in control of the world's natural rubber supply during WWII. As a result, the Allies had to come up with high-quality fake rubber for the gazillion tires and boots needed to get Jeeps and feet on the ground.
GR-S was flying out of factories at more than twice the rate of the natural stuff by the end of the war, so the need was met, for sure. What about the legacy of GR-S? Its synthetic cousins are used everywhere these days in everything from tires to hairbands to pet toys to rubberbands to surgical gloves and devices to sports equipment to erasers.
A chain reaction: the postwar GI Bill era ushered in a huge rise in suburban living. Suburbs aren't made for walking, so everyone started driving. Food also became cheaper, more abundant, and easier to prepare: a "post-war abundance" of fatty, processed foods grew in large part because the war left the government with a huge surplus of fertilizer and pesticides to use up corn production, especially, went through a boom that never really ended.
This abundance - with "stuffed refrigerators and snack-bearing moms with oversized smiles" - also quickly became symbolic of domestic well-being.
Today, obesity affects as many as The chemical name for Super Glue, cyanoacrylate , isn't nearly as catchy as it colloquial name. This super strong adhesive was discovered by scientists in while trying to create clear plastic gun sights for use in World War II.
Cyanoacrylates weren't the answer too sticky! Eastman Kodak researchers grabbed the sticky baton in and eventually released the adhesive as a commercial product under the name "Eastman " in It wasn't until the s that it gained the now-ubiquitous Super Glue name. Specifically, the government asked the company to create a cloth-based tape that would keep moisture out of ammunition cases.
This claim has been refuted by etymologist Jan Freeman, who says it doesn't hold water. Plastic in the 21st century has a pretty bad wrap. It has become synonymous with "cheap" in the age of artisanal everything.
But just after World War II, plastic - and especially Tupperware - was considered downright patriotic. Tupperware tumblers made of polyethylene, a plastic developed to insulate electrical wiring in wartime gadgets, were featured in full-color ads in popular magazines. In , inventor Earl Tupper literally compared polyethylene to a soldier: "With the end of the war [polyethylene] was another young veteran that had accelerated from childhood to a fighting job The newly created United Nations fell victim to the emerging Cold War.
Impacts of the war radiated outward. During the fighting in the British colony of Burma, now Myanmar, Burmans and ethnic minorities split, backing the Japanese and British, respectively. Japanese rule spurred nationalist sentiments in such colonies as India, Vietnam, and the Dutch East Indies now Indonesia. There followed a rush of countries jumping into the abyss of war, in which some twenty million people were killed, four major empires were destroyed, other states were greatly weakened, and the ideological viruses of communism, fascism, and Nazism were released.
The years before World War I were a time of increasing globalization and prosperity. However, the forces of Mercantilism lived on, as influential economic interests demanded protection and talked of economic war.
What should have brought people together pushed many apart. At the same time, nationalism exercised an increasing and increasingly dangerous hold over European governments. The United Kingdom was determined to preserve its colonial empire.
France was driven by revanchist demands to retake territory in Alsace and Lorraine recently lost to Prussia. Italians desperately sought territorial aggrandizement. All of these governments were prepared to use military force to advance a wide variety of ends, few terribly important let alone existential.
Desire for prestige and concern over credibility, demand for territorial expansion and resource acquisition, and expression of anger and ego motivated some leaders.
War was seen as merely another policy option. Even in the United States now venerated leaders, such as Theodore Roosevelt, worried that Americans would grow weak if they did not fight. In Rome, at least, there was no pretense of promoting democracy or ending war. The Europeans divided into contending alliances, making conflict far more likely. Rather than act as military firebreaks, these alliances became transmission belts of conflict. A political assassination in a distant Balkans city lit a fuse which ultimately brought every major European power into combat, along with the United States, Japan, and China.
Still, war was not inevitable, even though many policymakers imagined that it was so. Which caused them to take steps making it more likely. If conflict was inevitable, then perhaps it was best to fight now, suggested some. Virtually every power vastly overestimated their likelihood of success; none imagined the carnage to come.
In fact, one of the greatest oddities of modern history: Adolf Hitler and Roosevelt both became heads of government in January ; they both died in April ; Hitler tried to conquer the world; yet it was Roosevelt who just about did exactly that. But there were also long-term considerations.
The one that the country had to cope with immediately was the expense of the war. By the U. Several things helped. First of all, the government came up with all sorts of ways to finance the debt cheaply. Second, the U. Basically, all the industrial world except the Soviet portion was dominated by the U. And our country was also the sole great power that was physically untouched by the war. It generated, albeit artificially, immense prosperity, which to some extent we have taken for granted.
The tremendous military success of the United States was, of course, good — but it led to a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the U.
0コメント