The Great Depression 1929 1938

Discovering U.S. History spans the complex and varied history of the United States from prehistoric times to the present day. This new chronological set can be read as a whole, providing readers with a comprehensive history, or as standalone volumes, with each title serving as a time capsule of a particular era. Each title brings to life the people and events that have shaped the nation through a clear and entertaining narrative, interesting boxed insets, and lively full-color and black-and-white photographs and illustrations. Students will find these books valuable for reports, prime supplements to textbooks, or simply interesting reading.

Economists as diverse in approach as Lord Keynes and Milton Friedman have analyzed the causes of the Great Depression, and their answers have ranged from underconsumption to failings in monetary policy. In Part 1 of The Great Depression, Christian Saint-Etienne compares these theories with economic statistics for the interwar period and adds a further explanation: a collapse in international trade initiated by the Hawley-Smoot Tariff in the United States. Part 2 studies the economic history of the 1970s and the early 1980s to assess the likelhood of a depression in the 1980s. Among the author's recommendations for preventing a recurrence are free trade, reform of the international banking system, and coordination of the monetary policies of the major industrial nations.

Although Latin America weathered the Great Depression better than the United States and Europe, the global economic collapse of the 1930s had a deep and lasting impact on the region. The contributors to this book examine the consequences of the Depression in terms of the role of the state, party-political competition, and the formation of working-class and other social and political movements. Going beyond economic history, they chart the repercussions and policy responses in different countries while noting common cross-regional trends--in particular, a mounting critique of economic orthodoxy and greater state intervention in the economic, social, and cultural spheres, both trends crucial to the region's subsequent development. The book also examines how regional transformations interacted with and differed from global processes. Taken together, these essays deepen our understanding of the Great Depression as a formative experience in Latin America and provide a timely comparative perspective on the recent global economic crisis. Contributors. Marcelo Bucheli, Carlos Contreras, Paulo Drinot, Jeffrey L. Gould, Roy Hora, Alan Knight, Gillian McGillivray, Luis Felipe Sáenz, Angela Vergara, Joel Wolfe, Doug Yarrington

From the Nobel Prize–winning economist and former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, a landmark book that provides vital lessons for understanding financial crises and their sometimes-catastrophic economic effects As chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve during the Global Financial Crisis, Ben Bernanke helped avert a greater financial disaster than the Great Depression. And he did so by drawing directly on what he had learned from years of studying the causes of the economic catastrophe of the 1930s—work for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize. Essays on the Great Depression brings together Bernanke’s influential work on the origins and economic lessons of the Depression, and this new edition also includes his Nobel Prize lecture.

Patricia Clavin offers a comparative study of the origins, course and consequences of the deepest economic crisis in modern European history. Written with the non-economist in mind, the book examines recent ideas on the cause of the Great Depression.

America's Great Depression is the classic treatise on the 1930s Great Depression and its root causes. Author Rothbard blames government interventionist policies for magnifying the duration, breadth, and intensity of the Great Depression. He explains how government manipulation of the money supply sets the stage for the familiar "boom-bust" phases of the modern market which we know all too well. He then details the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve from 1921 to 1929 as evidence that the depression was essentially caused not by speculation, but by government and central bank interference in the market. Clearly we find history tragically repeating itself today. A must-read.

The worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s was the most traumatic event of the twentieth century. It ushered in substantial expansions in the role of governments around the world, focused attention on social insurance, and for a time bolstered socialist economic ideas as a form of cure. Skepticism about the effectiveness of government withered as the free market failed, and it seems safe to say that Keynesian economics would not have flourished if the depression had not occurred. While this severe contraction has been extensively examined, we are just now—thanks to increasingly sophisticated analytical techniques—beginning to comprehend its causes and the reasons for the extremely slow recovery that occurred in the United States. Much of this analysis, though, remains in specialized studies that are visited mainly by economists and economic historians. In Rethinking the Great Depression, Gene Smiley draws upon this recent scholarship to present a clear and nontechnical analysis for the general reader. He explains the roots of the depression in the 1920s, the efforts of the New Deal to combat the economic crisis, and the legacy of these efforts in World War II and the postwar years. He offers new insights and some surprising conclusions: that the causes of the Great Depression lay in the dislocations caused by World War I and the attempt to reconstitute an international gold standard in the 1920s; that the New Deal, regardless of its good intentions, adopted misguided fiscal and monetary policies that prolonged the depression in the United States beyond what it should have been; that World War II, rather than stimulating an end to the depression, actually postponed a full recovery until 1946.