Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Great Depression
For all his previous successes, President Herbert Hoover proved incapable of arresting the economic free fall of the Depression— or soothing the fears of a distressed nation.
On March 4, 1929, Herbert Hoover took the oath of office as the 31st president of the United States. America, its new leader told the rain-soaked crowd of 50,0000 around the Capitol and countless more listening on the radio, was “filled with millions of happy homes; blessed with comfort and opportunity.”
Few periods in the history of this country can match the impact of the years between 1917 and 1941. In less than a generation, America experienced the first large-scale dispatch of U.S.
A fine documentary on the Great Depression, an admirable accompanying book, and a truly wretched biography
It has been six years since Henry Hampton’s extraordinary six-part documentary series Eyes on the Prize first ran on public television and reminded us, as nothing ever had before, of the role that ordinary citizens—black and white, but m
Shakespeare—that master limner of the ways of kings—probed the frequent conflict between sovereigns and their heirs- apparent in Henry IV, Part I.
There is an old saying about the transitory nature of American fortunes: shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. As Donald Trump has discovered, they can vanish a lot faster than that. But Trump is not the record holder for financial plummeting (at least not yet).
How much did we lose?” my wife asked me on the day the stock market sank like a stone last October. I did some quick arithmetic and answered, with remarkably good cheer under the circumstances, that we had lost only a little more than two times our annual income.
The Sunday afternoon broadcasts of Rev. Charles E. Coughlin, once described as the "voice of God," were avidly followed by a radio audience of thirty to fifty million Americans during the Thirties.
About 1935, anno Domini, the Reverend Charles E. Coughlin, pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, was perhaps the most beloved and most hated, the most respected and most feared man in the United States.
As the twenties roared on, a market crash became inevitable. Why? And who should have stopped it?
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