There are advantages to focusing a single analytical lens on a complex and multidimensional historical event. Lines of causation can be drawn clearly. Intention, action, and consequence can be isolated and explored in depth. This is what Daniel Kryder has done for federal policy toward African Americans during World War II. A political scientist, Kryder looks at African Americans in war production industries, the army, and southern agriculture in the context of two overriding imperatives of officials of the federal state: maintaining wartime production and gaining reelection. He moves to the heart of what states do in wartime. They mobilize industry and people. They suppress dissent. They contain social unrest. Given these demands it is not surprising, Kryder argues, that reform of federal racial policy between 1941 and 1945 was so limited in scope, despite widespread black protest, calls for more progressive measures, and the popular “Double V” campaign. But there are also pitfalls to the single analytical lens, and Kryder encounters these in his conclusion. From one point of view, “the war contained rather than facilitated movements for black liberation” (243), as Kryder argues, but from another vantage the war told an entirely different story.