The Decade Rooms · 1940–1949

The Forties — The House Goes to War

Ration books, victory gardens, and the kitchen as home front.

Life at home

The house fights: blackout curtains, saved bacon grease, sugar by the stamp. Women run the factories and the checkbooks. Then 1945 turns the whole machine around - and the pressure cooker, the aerosol can, and a little thing called the transistor come home with the troops.

The gadget of the decade

The pressure cooker - the home front weapon that beat the ration book at its own game.

The hard thread

The gold-star window; the internment order; the telegram no family wanted. The decade holds the century's hardest mail.

Other eyes

A Tuskegee airman, a Rosie on the line, a Japanese-American teenager behind wire in Manzanar - the war looks profoundly different depending on which window you watch it from.