Book Reviews : American Diplomacy during the Second World War, 1941-1945. By GADDIS SMITH. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965. Pp. ix, 194. $4.95, paper $1.95.)

• Published date: 01 March 1966
• DOI: 10.1177/106591296601900158
• Date: 01 March 1966
• Subject Matter: Articles

202
University Press, 1961), turns up a wealth of information and interpretation on the
most significant and revolutionary period in the three hundred years covered by
Siebert.
Had this been done, the nearly insuperable problems involving freedom of the
press during the Interregnum, 1642-60, and the transcendent contributions to this
freedom might have been more objectively and fully presented. Never before in the
history of western civilization, nor for a long time thereafter, was the publication
of news undertaken on such a &dquo;comparatively massive scale.&dquo; This created a great
new
moral and political problem for government to wrestle with. Thomas Jefferson
might not have approved of all the policies of licensed printing by Oliver Cromwell
and his contemporaries, but the fact is the newspapers of the Interregnum were full
of the common news, or history, of their day. And out of this news flows very clearly
the secularism of the Puritan revolution, the important role of the City, that literary
genius was often synonymous with first-class journalism, and that Restoration prose
predated the Restoration. The good and bad seeds of today’s circulation of the mass
media of the press in a free society were planted in the Interregnum. &dquo;The Restor-
ation slowed their growth; it did not kill them.&dquo;
E. MALCOLM HAUSE
University of Idaho
American Diplomacy during the Second World War, 1941-1945. By GADDIS SMITH.
(New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965. Pp. ix, 194. $4.95, paper $1.95.)
In the score of years since the end of the second world war a great quantity and
variety of sources for the student of this diplomacy have been made available. There
is also a sizable and growing number of books and articles by scholars in this field,
one of the former being American Diplomacy during the Second World War,1941-
1945, by Gaddis Smith of Yale University. The book is one of a series of eight on
American diplomatic history with the general title America in Crisis...