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Preface
Approximately one presidential administration removed from the Great
Recession of 2008, an event still referred to as the worst economic cri-
sis since the Great Depression, a study of that fi rst economic crisis is not
only timely but relevant, as the country still struggles to fully regain the
economic footing that it lost with the burst of the housing bubble and the
bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Th e Great Depression—the worst eco-
nomic crisis the industrialized Western world has ever seen—permanently
changed public policy, setting in motion many of the economic patterns,
political templates, and government programs that still govern U.S. so-
cial and economic policies. Until the 1930s, most Americans believed that
the economy regulated itself according to impersonal, natural economic
laws, and they were comfortable leaving economic matters to those mar-
ket forces. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal made
the government a key player in the economy, and eventually Americans
delegated to Washington, D.C., the responsibility of maintaining full em-
ployment and stable prices. Th e advent of Keynesian economics during the
1930s also gave the federal government unprecedented tools for control-
ling the economy.
Th is book is designed to support advanced high school and early un-
dergraduate readers. It will support teachers and students in Advanced
Placement U.S. History courses and provide a valuable supplement to any
Common Core history curriculum that covers the era. In particular, the
book’s organization has been selected to align with primary- and secondary-
source materials, in order to promote in-depth analysis and understand-
ing of the specifi c details of the crisis and the patterns of change that it
set in motion. Th e Advanced Placement curriculum framework for the
period which encompasses the Great Depression (Period 7: 1890–1945)
centers on key concepts such as economic cycles and market fl uctuation,
