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Stock Market Crash
The stock market collapses, signaling the onset of the Great Depression. The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaks in September 1929 at 381.17—a level that it will not reach again until 1954. The Dow will bottom out at a Depression-era low of just 41.22 in 1932. -
Smoot-Hawley Tariff
Congress passes the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, steeply raising import duties in an attempt to protect American manufactures from foreign competition. The tariff increase has little impact on the American economy, but plunges Europe farther into crisis. -
Major Bank Crash
New York's Bank collapses in the largest bank failure to date in American history. $200 million in deposits disappear, and the bank's customers are left holding the bag. -
The New Deal
Was a series of domestic programs enacted in the United States between 1933 and 1938, They included both laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term (1933–37) of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. -
National Recovery Administration
The goal was to eliminate "cut-throat competition" by bringing industry, labor and government together to create codes of "fair practices" and set prices. -
Dust Bowl Begins
Period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the US and Canadian prairies during the 1930s -
WWII Starts
The end of the great depression and the beginning of WWII
