| ▲ | bitwize 5 days ago | ||||||||||||||||
That's half of it. The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower. So the war also taught lessons on a societal level about organization and cooperation, and the postwar economic boom provided the means to get great things done. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | jcranmer 5 days ago | parent [-] | ||||||||||||||||
> The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower. The US was the leading industrial power from around 1880 or 1890, and it became the leading military power in the 1910s (by dint of entering WWI so late that it didn't exhaust its manpower fighting it). It may have been a cultural backwater as late as WWI, but its economic status would have been fairly undisputed. And by WWII, the only question anyone would have seriously asked is if the US or the UK held the throne as greatest of the great powers. | |||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||