Great Depression History

There is no single theory of what caused the Great Depression and never will be, Morris argues. Macreconomics is a social science, and such a massive event always takes its shape from a terrible confluence of factors. The mismanagement of the gold standard, the growth in consumer credit, the insistence on deflation, and the inability of the major European belligerents of World War I to agree on a reconstruction agenda are just a few of the shocks that pushed the world into an economic Armageddon.

Celebrating its 75th anniversary, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men remains one of America's most widely read and beloved novels. Here is Steinbeck’s dramatic adaptation of his novel-as-play, which received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play in 1937-1938 and has featured a number of actors who have played the iconic roles of George and Lennie on stage and film, including James Earl Jones, John Malkovich and Gary Sinise.

Children of the Cotton PatchCotton—like the families that produced it—is today undervalued for its contribution to Texas’s wealth and heritage, but for the region’s first century as a colony, a nation and then a state, the fluffy commodity carried the Lone Star economy bale by bale toward prosperity. In Cotton-Picking Folks, award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction Preston Lewis explores one family’s experiences on dryland tenant farms during the Great Depression and the waning years of the sharecropping and crop lien system. As the grandson of a tenant farmer, Lewis in the ...

In the minds of historians and the American public alike, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of our greatest presidents, not least because he supposedly saved America from the Great Depression. But as historian Jim Powell reveals in this groundbreaking book, Roosevelt's New Deal policies actually prolonged and exacerbated the economic disaster.

In this superb audiobook, Tom Brokaw goes out into America to tell through the stories of individual men and women the story of a generation. America's citizen heroes and heroines who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America. This generation was united not only by a common purpose, but also by common values- duty, honor, economy, courage, service, love of family and country, and, above all, responsibility for oneself.

During Leora Goff’s early decades, she gathered the tenacity, optimism and hope she would need throughout her long life. When she married Clabe Wilson, they became forged into parents who would shepherd their own family through two more great eras of world and local history--the Great Depression and WWII.

At the height of the Great Depression, 250,000 teenagers were roaming America. Some left home because they felt they were a burden to their families; some fled homes shattered by the shame of unemployment and poverty; some left because it seemed a great adventure. Whether with the blessings of parents or as runaways, they hit the road and went in search of a better life. By summer 1932, the "roving boy" had become a fixture on the American landscape. The occasional girl was sighted, too, most passing unrecognized in male garb.

For four consecutive years Shirley Temple was the world’s box-office champion, a record never equaled. By early 1935 her mail was reported as four thousand letters a week, and hers was the second-most popular girl’s name in the country. What distinguished Shirley Temple from every other Hollywood star of the period - and everyone since - was how brilliantly she shone.

The 1930s are the darkest days of the Great Depression. Factories are closing their doors, millions of people are out of work, men are riding the rails searching for elusive jobs that seldom exist, and a thriving way of life that has been cherished is disappearing. Desperate people are doing desperate things just to survive, while labor strikes and veterans’ protests are turning violent. Roving gangs of outlaws have become celebrities to many people, who asked themselves why a man robbing a bank with a gun is any worse than a banker in a suit stealing someone’s life savings, home, or ...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the plume birds of Florida were in peril. Their valuable feathers were used in the international millinery trade and their extinction was imminent. A cadre of dedicated Audubon Society wardens helped to slow their destruction. Among them were the martyrs of early wildlife conservation, Guy Bradley and Columbus McCleod. Both of these men died in the line of duty protecting plume birds in South Florida. This book is based on what came after those tragedies, when a new generation of protectors picked up the conservation torch. It is nearly twenty-five ...

An inspiring account of America at its worst - and Americans at their best - woven from the stories of Depression-era families who were helped by gifts from the author's generous and secretive grandfather.

Few decades capture the imagination like the 1920s. Like so many good stories, it got its start from a time of great turmoil and ended in a dramatic fashion. What happened between 1920 and 1929 has passed beyond history and has become legend.

Just as today’s observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world.

Among America’s most infamous “public enemies” and, perhaps, the most unique and controversial was Kate Barker. With her prominent, hawk-tipped nose and plump, doughy face, framed by a classic dark, curly coif and frilly day dresses to match, Ma Barker was as nonthreatening as they come. Nary a second glance was given to this grandmotherly figure by those who crossed her path, perhaps, at most a polite tip of the hat. Of course, as the age-old adage goes, appearances are often deceiving.

In 2018, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Hank Paulson came together to reflect on the lessons of the 2008 financial crisis 10 years on. Recognizing that, as Ben put it, "the enemy is forgetting," they examine the causes of the crisis, why it was so damaging, and what it ultimately took to prevent a second Great Depression. And they provide to their successors in the United States and the finance ministers and central bank governors of other countries a valuable playbook for reducing the damage from future financial crises.

Taming the Street describes how President Franklin D. Roosevelt battled to regulate Wall Street in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression. With deep reporting and vivid storytelling, Diana B. Henriques takes listeners back to a time when America’s financial landscape was a jungle ruled by the titans of vast wealth, largely unrestrained by government. Roosevelt ran for office in 1932 vowing to curb that ruthless capitalism and make the world of finance safer for ordinary savers and investors.

The captivating second volume of this Eleanor Roosevelt biography covers tumultuous era of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the gathering storms of World War II, the years of the Roosevelts' greatest challenges and finest achievements. In her remarkably engaging narrative, Cook gives us the complete Eleanor Roosevelt - an adventurous, romantic woman, a devoted wife and mother, and a visionary policymaker and social activist who often took unpopular stands, counter to her husband's policies, especially on issues such as racial justice and women's rights.

Just as people all over America in the second-half of the 1930s, the people of Tinder Street are struggling to survive. They have their triumphs and their challenges, their joys and their heartbreaks, but the McNallys and their extended family never give up and continue to help their neighbors and even strangers in need. Hardworking family men who once brought home steady paychecks stand in long lines trying to find any kind of day labor that might earn them enough to put food on the table. Even those who find steady work earn pennies on the dollar compared to what they had before the Great...

Elizabeth has one goal in life—to go to college and become a teacher. But it is 1929 in Kuna, Idaho, and the small family farm doesn’t produce enough to send both Elizabeth and her twin brother to college. Just when it seems Elizabeth’s dreams might come true the stock market crashes and the devastating Great Depression engulfs the nation. Overnight Elizabeth’s anxiety over tuition payments is superseded by fear that her parents will lose the farm. Is this one disaster that even Elizabeth’s faith in hard work and God can’t overcome?

The New York Times bestselling author of The Greatest Generation tells the inspiring, deeply personal story of his own family's greatest generation: his parents, who embodied the can-do spirit that enabled them to survive the Great Depression and World War II, and to help build the American century.