Research Project
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE:
Conduct a small research project in class to determine the CAUSES/EFFECTS of the Great Depression. Who were the key players? What are essential questions? What are significant terms to know? What other research should be done about the Great Depression?
Relate the Great Depression to the recent Recession in American Society. How are the two similar and/or different?
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE:
Conduct a small research project in class to determine the CAUSES/EFFECTS of the Great Depression. Who were the key players? What are essential questions? What are significant terms to know? What other research should be done about the Great Depression?
Relate the Great Depression to the recent Recession in American Society. How are the two similar and/or different?
Great Depression: Cause and Effect
Cause: The stock market crashed
Effect: Throughout the 1920s the stock market significantly grew, and the more it grew, the more people wanted to put money into it., so when it crashed, many people lost money or were on debt and they were forced to pay up on stocks that were worth far less than what they had paid for them.
Cause: Many small banks failed
Many small banks, particularly in rural areas, had overextended credit to farmers who often could not repay the loans and big banks foolishly made huge loans to foreign countries.
Effect: When times got tough and U.S. banks stopped loaning money, as a result, many banks went bankrupt. Depositors panicked and withdrew their money. The closings and panics almost completely shut down the country’s banking system.
Cause: Farm failures.
Effect: Many American farmers were already having a hard time before the Depression, mostly because they were producing too much and farm product prices were too low. The situation was so bad in some areas that farmers burned corn for fuel rather than sell it.
Key Players
Charles Coughlin
Huey P. Long
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Fritz Kuhn
Eleanor Roosevelt
Lorena Hickok
Francis Townsend
Essential Questions:
Why were the policies of the Hoover Administration ineffective in dealing with the problems of the Depression?
Why did the New Deal seek to solve the problems of the Depression through public works, rather than the dole?
What impact did the New Deal have on arts and letters in the 1930s?
What underlying issues and conditions led to the Great Depression?
What economic conditions led to the stock market crash of 1929?
How did Franklin D. Roosevelt change the role of the presidency in American history?
Terms to Know
Overproduction: situation in which the supply of manufactured goods exceeds the demand
Bankruptcy: financial failure caused by an inability to pay one's debts
Default: failure to pay loans
Bonus: additional sum of money
Fireside; chat in formal radio speech first given by FDR while in office
Pension: sum of money paid regularly as a retirement benefit
Payroll tax money: the money is authorized to remove from a workers salary and used to support the government
Collective bargaining: negotiation between a company management and a union representing a group of workers about wages, benefits and working conditions
Deficit spending: government practice of spending more money than is taken from taxes
Great Depression vs. Modern Recession Compare and Contrast;
Great Depression
The Great Depression, lasting from 1929 until 1939, was the deepest and longest-lasting economic decline in the history of the industrialized world. In the United States, the Great Depression began when the stock market crashed in October of 1929, which wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, raising levels of unemployment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, 13 to 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half of the country's banks had failed. The acting president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, helped lessen the worst effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s,but the economy did not fully turn around until after 1939, when World War II provided industrial jobs, and slowly increased that employment rate. |
Modern-Day Recession
Recession is the decline in activity across an economy. The global recession of 2008-2009 brought a great amount of attention to the risky investment strategies used by many large financial businesses. As a result of such a wide-spread global recession, the economies of nearly all of the world's nations suffered extreme set-backs and numerous policies were used to help prevent a similar future financial crisis. Today, our government is in deep debt, and the employment rate is skyrocketing. |