The Rutabaga Winter

I’m currently working on wartime food shortages in Berlin in the First World War. The short version? Things were rough. Then, in the winter of 1916, things got worse. You’d like a few more details? Okay then. Germany was not self-sufficient in terms of food even before the war. The country relied heavily on imported…

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Forty-Two Keys for Victory

Rationing, shortages, and the clever ways people coped with them are recurring themes in books about the American home front in World War II, fiction and non-fiction alike. (Even the new roles of women in the workplace were the result of a critical shortage of men.) Food and gas rationing, rubber and metal shortages and…

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