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Stock Market Crash
"On Thursday, October 24, 1929, stock market prices suddenly plummeted. Ten billion dollars in investments (roughly equivalent to about $100 billion today) disappeared in a matter of hours. Panicked selling set in, stock values sank to sudden lows, and stunned investors crowded the New York Stock Exchange demanding answers" (The Great Depression, 2019). "On October 29, Black Tuesday, the stock market began its long precipitous fall. Stock values evaporated" (The Great Depression, 2019). -
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Great Depression
Started with the stock market crash (The Great Depression, 2019). "...sank the American economy into the greatest of all economic crises. Rising inequality, declining demand, rural collapse, overextended investors, and the bursting of speculative bubbles all conspired to plunge the nation into the Great Depression" (The Great Depression, 2019). "... the final contributing element of the Great Depression was a quintessentially human one: panic" (The Great Depression, 2019). -
Bonus Army
"..summer of 1932, Congress debated a bill authorizing immediate payment of long-promised cash bonuses to veterans of World War I..." (The Great Depression, 2019). "Hoover opposed the bill" (The Great Depression, 2019). "While most of the 'Bonus Army' left Washington in defeat, many stayed to press their case" (The Great Depression, 2019). US troops then came and "stormed" the city, making people leave (The Great Depression, 2019). Photo Credit: Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo, 1932 -
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Dust Bowl
"On the Great Plains, environmental catastrophe deepened America’s longstanding agricultural crisis and magnified the tragedy of the Depression. Beginning in 1932, severe droughts hit from Texas to the Dakotas and lasted until at least 1936. The droughts compounded years of agricultural mismanagement" (The Great Depression, 2019). "The Dust Bowl, as the region became known, exposed all-too-late the need for conservation" (The Great Depression, 2019). -
Franklin Roosevelt Becomes President
"... Roosevelt crushed Hoover. He won more counties than any previous candidate in American history. He spent the months between his election and inauguration traveling, planning, and assembling a team of advisors, the famous Brain Trust of academics and experts, to help him formulate a plan of attack. On March 4, 1933, in his first inaugural address, Roosevelt famously declared, 'This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper...'"(The Great Depression, 2019). -
Social Security Act
"The signature piece of Roosevelt’s Second New Deal came the same year, in 1935. The Social Security Act provided for old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and economic aid, based on means, to assist both the elderly and dependent children. The president was careful to mitigate some of the criticism from what was, at the time, in the American context, a revolutionary concept" (The Great Depression, 2019). -
World War II Begins
"In March 1939, Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia and began to make demands on Poland. Britain and France promised war...Hitler signed a secret agreement—the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—with the Soviet Union that coordinated the splitting of Poland between the two powers and promised nonaggression thereafter. The European war began when the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Britain and France declared war two days later and mobilized their armies" (World War II, 2019). -
Attack on Pearl Harbor
"On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Japanese military planners hoped to destroy enough battleships and aircraft carriers to cripple American naval power for years. Twenty-four hundred Americans were killed in the attack" (World War II, 2019). "Within a week of Pearl Harbor the United States had declared war on the entire Axis..." (World War II, 2019).