The Great Depression and World War II (Explorer Library: Language Arts Explorer)

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Hesse, Karen Fiction Paperback. The Story Of The Dustbowl. Marrin, Albert Nonfiction Paperback. Reading Level Chart Enter a search query. For full access to Teacher Resources, please log in to Booksource. Perfect for supporting social studies curriculum, this collection focuses on the Great Depression.

It includes both fiction and nonfiction texts to help engage students and increase their understanding of the issues and themes of this period in history. Skip to main content.

The Great Depression and World War II, | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

From Reconquest to Conquest Where am I? The Mecklenburg Resolves Liberty to Slaves: For the War Debating War with Britain: The North Carolina Star, Sept. The Raleigh Register, Sept. Expenses Managing a Plantation: Scourge of the Streets? Warm Springs The Growth of Tourism: Work and Protest, — Work and Protest: Board of Education and School Desegregation Brown v. North Carolina's Response to Brown v. William Culp Swann v.

Fran Jackson Perspectives on School Desegregation: Jones A Soldier's Experience in Vietnam: Banking and Finance Key Industries: Hog Farming Key Industries: Information Technology Key Industries: John Lawson Appendix D: Rip Van Winkle Appendix E: North Carolina's Governors Appendix H.

The Election of Results by State Appendix I: Remembering the Revolution Appendix J: Organization of Civil War armies Appendix L: Memorial Day Appendix N: Letters Identify the Source What is the nature of this source? Who created this source, and what do I know about her, him, or them?

The Great Depression and World War II

When was the source produced? Where was the source produced? Contextualize the Source What do I know about the historical context of this source? What do I know about how the creator of this source fits into that historical context? Why did the person who created the source do so? Explore the Source What factual information is conveyed in this source? What opinions are related in this source?

What is implied or conveyed unintentionally in the source? What is not said in the source? What is surprising or interesting about the source? It did not entirely lift until the next world war, more than twenty years later. Virtually none enjoyed such common urban amenities as electricity and indoor plumbing. Other maladies began to appear, faintly at first, but with mounting urgency as the Depression began to unfold.

Some twenty-five thousand banks, most of them highly fragile "unitary" institutions with tiny service areas, little or no diversification of clients or assets, and microscopic capitalization, constituted the astonishingly vulnerable foundation of the national credit.

As for government—public spending at all levels, including towns, cities, counties, states, and the federal government itself, amounted only to about 15 percent of the gross domestic product in the s, one-fifth of which was federal expenditures. Ideology aside, its very size made the federal government in the s a kind of ninety-pound weakling in the fight against the looming depression. Then in the autumn of , the bubble burst. The Great Crash in October sent stock prices plummeting and all but froze the international flow of credit. Banks failed by the thousands. Businesses collapsed by the tens of thousands.

Herbert Hoover, elected just months earlier amid lavish testimonials to his peerless competence, saw his presidency shattered and his reputation forever shredded because of his inability to tame the depression monster—though, again contrary to legend, he toiled valiantly, using what tools he had and even inventing some new ones, as he struggled to get the upper hand. By , some thirteen million Americans were out of work, one out of every four able and willing workers in the country.

Even those horrendous numbers could not begin to take the full measure of the human misery that unemployment entailed. Given the demography of the labor force and prevailing cultural norms that kept most women—and virtually all married women—out of the wage-paying economy, a 25 percent unemployment rate meant that, for all practical purposes, every fourth household in America had no breadwinner.

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Many Americans came to believe that they were witnessing not just another downswing of the business cycle, but the collapse of a historic economic, political, and social order, perhaps even the end of the American way of life. Yet curiously, as many observers noted, most Americans remained inexplicably docile, even passive, in the face of this unprecedented calamity.

Among those who were perplexed by the apparent submissiveness of the American people as the Depression descended was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Repeatedly he spoke of this, saying that it was enormously puzzling to him that the ordeal of the past three years had been endured so peaceably. Those elusive but deep-seated and powerful American cultural characteristics go a long way toward explaining the challenge that faced any leader seeking to broaden the powers of government to combat the Depression.

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Elected to the presidency in on a platform that promised "a new deal for the American people," Franklin Roosevelt now took up that challenge. He faced a task of compound difficulty: FDR was destined to hold office for more than a dozen years. He was thrice re-elected, a record matched by no previous incumbent and forbidden to all future presidents by the passage of the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution in FDR was then and has remained ever since a surpassingly enigmatic figure.

His personality perplexed his contemporaries and has challenged his biographers ever since. His long-serving secretary of labor, Frances Perkins, called him "the most complicated human being I ever knew. It is appropriate to call it a vision: Roosevelt, like Hoover before him, never did find a remedy for the Great Depression. It hung heavily over the land for nearly a dozen years of suffering and anxiety without equal in the history of the republic.

For the decade of the s as a whole, it averaged 17 percent. They gave birth to other institutions as well, including the Federal Housing Authority FHA and the Federal National Mortgage Association "Fannie Mae" to make mortgage lending more secure, thereby unleashing the money and the energy that made a majority of Americans homeowners and built the suburbs of the Sunbelt after World War II. They passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, abolishing at last the scourge of child labor and establishing minimum wage guarantees.

Most famously, with the Social Security Act of they erected a comprehensive system of unemployment and old-age insurance to protect laid-off workers and the elderly against what FDR called "the hazards and vicissitudes of life. These were on the whole market-enhancing, not market-encroaching initiatives. They sought not to nationalize core industries as commonly occurred in European states , nor even to attempt central direction of the national economy, but rather to use federal power in artful ways to make the private economy function more efficiently and less riskily as well as more fairly.

The New Deal serves to this day as a political talisman, invoked variously by Left or Right to promote or denounce activist government or an enlarged public sphere.