Download or read book America s First Great Depression written by Alasdair Roberts and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a while, it seemed impossible to lose money on real estate. But then the bubble burst. The financial sector was paralyzed and the economy contracted. State and federal governments struggled to pay their domestic and foreign creditors. Washington was incapable of decisive action. The country seethed with political and social unrest. In America's First Great Depression, Alasdair Roberts describes how the United States dealt with the economic and political crisis that followed the Panic of 1837. As Roberts shows, the two decades that preceded the Panic had marked a democratic surge in the United States. However, the nation’s commitment to democracy was tested severely during this crisis. Foreign lenders questioned whether American politicians could make the unpopular decisions needed on spending and taxing. State and local officials struggled to put down riots and rebellion. A few wondered whether this was the end of America’s democratic experiment. Roberts explains how the country’s woes were complicated by its dependence on foreign trade and investment, particularly with Britain. Aware of the contemporary relevance of this story, Roberts examines how the country responded to the political and cultural aftershocks of 1837, transforming its political institutions to strike a new balance between liberty and social order, and uneasily coming to terms with its place in the global economy.
Download or read book The Panic of 1819 written by Andrew H. Browning and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Panic of 1819 tells the story of the first nationwide economic collapse to strike the United States. Much more than a banking crisis or real estate bubble, the Panic was the culmination of an economic wave that rolled through the United States, forming before the War of 1812, cresting with the land and cotton boom of 1818, and crashing just as the nation confronted the crisis over slavery in Missouri. The Panic introduced Americans to the new phenomenon of boom and bust, changed the country's attitudes towards wealth and poverty, spurred the political movement that became Jacksonian Democracy, and helped create the sectional divide that would lead to the Civil War. Although it stands as one of the turning points of American history, few Americans today have heard of the Panic of 1819, with the result that we continue to ignore its lessons—and repeat its mistakes.
Download or read book America s Great Depression written by Murray N Rothbard and published by . This book was released on 2022-11-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an analysis of the causes of the Great Depression of 1929. The author concludes that the Depression was caused not by laissez-faire capitalism, but by government intervention in the economy. The author argues that the Hoover administration violated the tradition of previous American depressions by intervening in an unprecedented way and that the result was a disastrous prolongation of unemployment and depression so that a typical business cycle became a lingering disease.
Download or read book Panic of 1819 Reactions and Policies The written by Murray Newton Rothbard and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 2007 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fortune Tellers written by Walter Friedman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping history of the pioneers who sought to use science to predict financial markets The period leading up to the Great Depression witnessed the rise of the economic forecasters, pioneers who sought to use the tools of science to predict the future, with the aim of profiting from their forecasts. This book chronicles the lives and careers of the men who defined this first wave of economic fortune tellers, men such as Roger Babson, Irving Fisher, John Moody, C. J. Bullock, and Warren Persons. They competed to sell their distinctive methods of prediction to investors and businesses, and thrived in the boom years that followed World War I. Yet, almost to a man, they failed to predict the devastating crash of 1929. Walter Friedman paints vivid portraits of entrepreneurs who shared a belief that the rational world of numbers and reason could tame--or at least foresee--the irrational gyrations of the market. Despite their failures, this first generation of economic forecasters helped to make the prediction of economic trends a central economic activity, and shed light on the mechanics of financial markets by providing a range of statistics and information about individual firms. They also raised questions that are still relevant today. What is science and what is merely guesswork in forecasting? What motivates people to buy forecasts? Does the act of forecasting set in motion unforeseen events that can counteract the forecast made? Masterful and compelling, Fortune Tellers highlights the risk and uncertainty that are inherent to capitalism itself.
Download or read book Someplace Like America written by Dale Maharidge and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Updated edition with a new preface and afterword"--Cover.
Download or read book Crash written by Marc Favreau and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The incredible true story of how real people weathered one of the most turbulent periods in American history—the Great Depression—and emerged triumphant. From the sweeping consequences of the stock market crash to the riveting stories of individuals and communities caught up in a real American dystopia, discover how the country we live in today was built in response to a time when people from all walks of life fell victim to poverty, insecurity, and fear. Meet fascinating historical characters like Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, Dorothea Lange, Walter White, and Mary McLeod Bethune. See what life was like for regular Americans as the country went from the highs of the Roaring Twenties to the lows of the Great Depression, before bouncing back again during World War II. Explore pivotal scenes such as the creation of the New Deal, life in the Dust Bowl, the sit-down strikes in Michigan, the Scottsboro case, and the rise of Father Coughlin. Packed with photographs and firsthand accounts, and written with a keen understanding of the upheaval of the 1930s, Crash shares the incredible story of how America survived—and, ultimately, thrived.
Download or read book America s Great Depression written by Murray Newton Rothbard and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 2000 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applied Austrian economics doesn't get better than this. Murray N. Rothbard's America's Great Depression is a staple of modern economic literature and crucial for understanding a pivotal event in American and world history. The book remains canonical today because the debate is still very alive. This book applies Austrian business cycle theory to understanding the onset of the 1929 Great Depression. Rothbard first summarizes the Austrian theory and offers a criticism of competing theories, including the views of Keynes. Rothbard then considers Federal Reserve policy in the 1920s, showing its inflationary character. The influence of Benjamin Strong, the Governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, was especially important. In part, his expansionary policy was motivated by his desire to help Britain sustain the pound. Strong was close friends with Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England. After the 1929 crash, Herbert Hoover followed an interventionist policy that prefigured the New Deal. He favored keeping wage rates high and thus contributed to rising unemployment. Against the popular stereotype, Rothbard shows that Hoover was not a partisan of laissez-faire.
Download or read book To Ask for an Equal Chance written by Cheryl Lynn Greenberg and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2009-08-16 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great Depression hit Americans hard, but none harder than African Americans and the working poor. To Ask for an Equal Chance explores black experiences during this period and the intertwined challenges posed by race and class. "Last hired, first fired," black workers lost their jobs at twice the rate of whites, and faced greater obstacles in their search for economic security. Black workers, who were generally urban newcomers, impoverished and lacking industrial skills, were already at a disadvantage. These difficulties were intensified by an overt, and in the South legally entrenched, system of racial segregation and discrimination. New federal programs offered hope as they redefined government's responsibility for its citizens, but local implementation often proved racially discriminatory. As Cheryl Lynn Greenberg makes clear, African Americans were not passive victims of economic catastrophe or white racism; they responded to such challenges in a variety of political, social, and communal ways. The book explores both the external realities facing African Americans and individual and communal responses to them. While experiences varied depending on many factors including class, location, gender and community size, there are also unifying and overarching realities that applied universally. To Ask for an Equal Chance straddles the particular, with examinations of specific communities and experiences, and the general, with explorations of the broader effects of racism, discrimination, family, class, and political organizing.
Download or read book Endangered Dreams written by Kevin Starr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-11 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California, Wallace Stegner observed, is like the rest of the United States, only more so. Indeed, the Golden State has always seemed to be a place where the hopes and fears of the American dream have been played out in a bigger and bolder way. And no one has done more to capture this epic story than Kevin Starr, in his acclaimed series of gripping social and cultural histories. Now Starr carries his account into the 1930s, when the political extremes that threatened so much of the Depression-ravaged world--fascism and communism--loomed large across the California landscape. In Endangered Dreams, Starr paints a portrait that is both detailed and panoramic, offering a vivid look at the personalities and events that shaped a decade of explosive tension. He begins with the rise of radicalism on the Pacific Coast, which erupted when the Great Depression swept over California in the 1930s. Starr captures the triumphs and tumult of the great agricultural strikes in the Imperial Valley, the San Joaquin Valley, Stockton, and Salinas, identifying the crucial role played by Communist organizers; he also shows how, after some successes, the Communists disbanded their unions on direct orders of the Comintern in 1935. The highpoint of social conflict, however, was 1934, the year of the coastwide maritime strike, and here Starr's narrative talents are at their best, as he brings to life the astonishing general strike that took control of San Francisco, where workers led by charismatic longshoreman Harry Bridges mounted the barricades to stand off National Guardsmen. That same year socialist Upton Sinclair won the Democratic nomination for governor, and he launched his dramatic End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign. In the end, however, these challenges galvanized the Right in a corporate, legal, and vigilante counterattack that crushed both organized labor and Sinclair. And yet, the Depression also brought out the finest in Californians: state Democrats fought for a local New Deal; California natives helped care for more than a million impoverished migrants through public and private programs; artists movingly documented the impact of the Depression; and an unprecedented program of public works (capped by the Golden Gate Bridge) made the California we know today possible. In capturing the powerful forces that swept the state during the 1930s--radicalism, repression, construction, and artistic expression--Starr weaves an insightful analysis into his narrative fabric. Out of a shattered decade of economic and social dislocation, he constructs a coherent whole and a mirror for understanding our own time.
Download or read book The Many Panics of 1837 written by Jessica M. Lepler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-23 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals how people transformed their experiences of financial crisis into a single event that would serve as a turning point in American history.
Download or read book The Great Depression written by Robert S. McElvaine and published by Crown. This book was released on 2010-10-27 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the classic studies of the Great Depression, featuring a new introduction by the author with insights into the economic crises of 1929 and today. In the twenty-five years since its publication, critics and scholars have praised historian Robert McElvaine’s sweeping and authoritative history of the Great Depression as one of the best and most readable studies of the era. Combining clear-eyed insight into the machinations of politicians and economists who struggled to revive the battered economy, personal stories from the average people who were hardest hit by an economic crisis beyond their control, and an evocative depiction of the popular culture of the decade, McElvaine paints an epic picture of an America brought to its knees—but also brought together by people’s widely shared plight. In a new introduction, McElvaine draws striking parallels between the roots of the Great Depression and the economic meltdown that followed in the wake of the credit crisis of 2008. He also examines the resurgence of anti-regulation free market ideology, beginning in the Reagan era, and argues that some economists and politicians revised history and ignored the lessons of the Depression era.
Download or read book The Economics of the Great Depression written by Mark Wheeler and published by W. E. Upjohn Institute. This book was released on 1998 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Developed from lectures given at Western Michigan University as part of the 1996-1997 lecture series"--Page 6. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Download or read book The Great Depression in Latin America written by Paulo Drinot and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-18 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The Great Depression and the New Deal A Very Short Introduction written by Eric Rauchway and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-10 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Deal shaped our nation's politics for decades, and was seen by many as tantamount to the "American Way" itself. Now, in this superb compact history, Eric Rauchway offers an informed account of the New Deal and the Great Depression, illuminating its successes and failures. Rauchway first describes how the roots of the Great Depression lay in America's post-war economic policies--described as "laissez-faire with a vengeance"--which in effect isolated our nation from the world economy just when the world needed the United States most. He shows how the magnitude of the resulting economic upheaval, and the ineffectiveness of the old ways of dealing with financial hardships, set the stage for Roosevelt's vigorous (and sometimes unconstitutional) Depression-fighting policies. Indeed, Rauchway stresses that the New Deal only makes sense as a response to this global economic disaster. The book examines a key sampling of New Deal programs, ranging from the National Recovery Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the Public Works Administration and Social Security, revealing why some worked and others did not. In the end, Rauchway concludes, it was the coming of World War II that finally generated the political will to spend the massive amounts of public money needed to put Americans back to work. And only the Cold War saw the full implementation of New Deal policies abroad--including the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. Today we can look back at the New Deal and, for the first time, see its full complexity. Rauchway captures this complexity in a remarkably short space, making this book an ideal introduction to one of the great policy revolutions in history. About the Series: Oxford's Very Short Introductions offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, and Literary Theory to History. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given topic. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how it has developed and influenced society. Whatever the area of study, whatever the topic that fascinates the reader, the series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.
Download or read book The Return of Depression Economics written by Paul R. Krugman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1999 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of "The Age of Diminished Expectations" returns with a sobering tour of the global economic crises of the last two years.
Download or read book America s Financial Apocalypse written by Stathis and published by . This book was released on 2006-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly three decades, America has been gradually losing ground to the developed world in many critical areas. The result is that the American standard of living has been in decline for over two decades, with the middle class having been affected the most. Meanwhile, the rich have gotten wealthier and now America is a nation controlled by corporate America. Hidden by two-income households and open access to credit, declining living standards have gone unnoticed by most Americans. Spending beyond one's means has become the American way of life and is encouraged by the government. In contrast, saving is almost unheard of in America. As a result, this once power nation has changed from the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor. Decades of over consumption by Americans can only last so long before a day of reckoning occurs. The deflation of the Internet Bubble resulted in the paper loss of over $7 trillion dollars, yet most people seem to have already forgotten the most scandalous charades in U.S. history by Wall Street and corporate America. And now, as the retirement assets of tens of millions of Americans are in question, an even larger number are caught up in the largest real estate bubble in our history. As we enter the two next decades, 76 million baby boomers will retire, most of them in poverty. Thus, the generation that was responsible for creating the greatest bull market in U.S. history may, through no choice of its own, also be the same group that causes an economic meltdown due to decades of government mismanagement, inadequate planning, and overconsumption. During this same time frame, many expect the global oil production is gradually decline due to what is known as the peak oil theory. Obviously, this has enormous consequences of its own. Today, America is in the final preparatory stages that will lead to a massive economic meltdown resulting in the Next Great Depression, as over 46 million Americans already have no healthcare insurance, Social Security will be inadequate for the 76 million baby boomers who will retire over the next several years, energy prices will remain high for some time, and for the first time ever, Americans can no longer live with the comfort knowing that they are safe on their own soil. These issues will only get worse and when the appropriate triggers are set off, a domino effect will commence, sending the stock and bond markets into a downward spiral. This book claims to represent the most detailed and exhaustive analysis of America's current and future economic plight, as well as that of its capital markets. Rather than making bold claims supported by scant data, this book makes use of several hundred figures, tables, and charts, as well as over 700 references to support the premise that a depression is inevitable for America. Finally, the final three chapters address economic and market risks and provide investment guidance and strategy for investors to position themselves to profit before and during America's next great depression.
