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The Great Depression was the longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western world. The Great Depression began soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and rising levels of unemployment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, 15 million Americans were unemployed.
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The Second World War started on Spetember 1st, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
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On December 7, 1941 at approximetely 8:00am the Japanese launched a surprise torpedo attack on the US Naval Base Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The barrage lasted just two hours, but it was devastating.The Japanese managed to destroy nearly 20 American naval vessels, including eight enormous battleships, and almost 200 airplanes. More than 2,000 Americans soldiers and sailors died in the attack, and another 1,000 were wounded.
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The day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan. Congress approved his declaration with just one dissenting vote.
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Nazi Germany and its Axis partners decalred war on the United States.
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Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.” (referring to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
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On August 6th, 1954, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure.
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Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people.
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President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issue a declaration, signed by representatives of 26 countries, called the “United Nations.” The signatories of the declaration vowed to create an international postwar peacekeeping organization.
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As World War II was ending, a fear-driven movement known as the Second Red Scare began to spread across the United States. Americans feared that the Soviet Union hoped to spread communism all over the world, overthrowing both democratic and capitalist institutions as it went. Communism was, in theory, an expansionist ideology, spread through revolution. It suggested that the working class would overthrow the middle and upper classes.
