I wish I knew why I have always been fascinated with the portion of American history that happened in the two decades before I was born.

I was born in December of 1949, and the 20 years or so before I was born includes the Great Depression, World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. I learned a lot about it in 1977, when I first read William Manchester's amazing social history, "The Glory and the Dream," which covered the years 1932-72.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/glory.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1155" title="glory" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/glory-300x300.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300" /></a>I still have the two-volume set on the shelf behind me, and I have read it at least 15-20 times over the years. It's a much better historical document when it covers the first half of the period, and when you look at Manchester's work on say, Richard Nixon's first term, there probably isn't enough historical perspective for it to be really valuable.

I learned things about American history that I had never even heard of, like the massive hurricane that hit the East Coast during the Munich Conference and so was almost unknown in other parts of the country.

It was after reading that book that I started collecting other books on that period of history, and when I started taping movies and later collecting DVDs, I honed in on works about that time. Some of my very favorite movies -- as I've written here before -- were about the home front.

Films such as "The Human Comedy" and "Since You Went Away," as well as the classic of the British home front, "Mrs. Miniver," have found their way into my DVD player time and again..

Of course it's easy to put aside an hour and a half or two hours to watch a movie. It's a whole different thing to devote 38 hours or so to the largest portrayal ever of World War II. I'm talking about two of the last great TV miniseries, Herman Wouk's "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance." Both were based on books I have loved again and again, and both were released as miniseries in the 1980s and as DVDs about 15 years later.

[caption id="attachment_1156" align="alignleft" width="237" caption="War and Remembrance"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/index1.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-1156" title="index" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/index1.jpg" alt="" width="237" height="110" /></a>[/caption]

I watched both at the time I purchased them, and when we moved from California to Georgia and I weeded through my collection to reduce it by about a third, I decided to keep them.

The other night I started watching "Winds of War," and now I'm up to part two (of 12) of "War and Remembrance."

It's actually fortunate that they were made when they were, because the scope of Wouk's novels would be far too great for anyone to tackle in television or film these days.

Of course the portrayal of the war focuses far more on the ETO than on the war in the Pacific. As a Jew, Wouk felt it crucial to tell the story of the Holocaust, and I'm not sure it was ever done better -- or more comprehensively -- in popular entertainment.

Once I finish watching, I'll put the DVDs away on a back shelf. Maybe eight or 10 years from now I'll want to see them again. I'm pretty sure I'll read Wouk's books again, and I'm getting pretty close to another reading of "Glory and the Dream."

I love history, and I really am fascinated by this particular time. I suppose if I had to speculate on why, maybe it's that it was a time when everything seemed to matter so much, when the whole world was up for grabs.

That's all I've got for now.