1. What were the causes of the great depression?
Here are the top 4 reasons:
1) Stock Market Crash of 1929
Many believe erroneously that the stock market crash that occurred on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929 is one and the same with the Great Depression. In fact, it was one of the major causes that led to the Great Depression. Two months after the original crash in October, stockholders had lost more than $40 billion dollars. Even though the stock market began to regain some of its losses, by the end of 1930, it just was not enough and America truly entered what is called the Great Depression.
2)Bank Failures
Throughout the 1930s over 9,000 banks failed. Bank deposits were uninsured and thus as banks failed people simply lost their savings. Surviving banks, unsure of the economic situation and concerned for their own survival, stopped being as willing to create new loans. This exacerbated the situation leading to less and less expenditures.
3) Reduction in Purchasing Across the Board
With the stock market crash and the fears of further economic woes, individuals from all classes stopped purchasing items. This then led to a reduction in the number of items produced and thus a reduction in the workforce. As people lost their jobs, they were unable to keep up with paying for items they had bought through installment plans and their items were repossessed. More and more inventory began to accumulate. The unemployment rate rose above 25% which meant, of course, even less spending to help alleviate the economic situation.
4) American Economic Policy with Europe
As businesses began failing, the government created the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930 to help protect American companies. This charged a high tax for imports thereby leading to less trade between America and foreign countries along with some economic retaliation.
2. How did the great depression affect the nation and average americans.
People were losing their jobs, their homes. There was barely enough food or water. In that result people were dying off! The Great Depression affected their daily lives in many ways; people were losing their jobs, losing their houses, they had no clothes, no food, no water and no life. Most of the banks shut down and peoples accounts were cleaned out. But despite this active intervention that the president did, mass unemployment and economic stagnation continued, though on a somewhat reduced scale, with about 15 percent of the work force still unemployed in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II. After that, unemployment dropped rapidly as American factories were flooded with orders from overseas for armaments and munitions. The depression ended completely soon after the United States' entry into World War II in 1941. In Europe, the Great Depression strengthened extremist forces and lowered the prestige of liberal democracy. In Germany, economic distress directly contributed to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933. The Nazis' public-works projects and their rapid expansion of munitions production ended the Depression there by 1936.
3. What was the New Deal and what were some of its programs.
The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority (as well as the party which held the White House for seven out of nine Presidential terms from 1933 to 1969), with its base in liberal ideas, big city machines, and newly empowered labor unions, ethnic minorities, and the white South.
4. How did the great depression end?
http://www.museum.siu.edu/museum_classroom_grant/Museum_Explorers/school_pages/bourbonnais/page6.htm
1. What was the dust bowl
The Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940). The phenomenon was caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops or other techniques to prevent wind erosion.[1] Deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains had displaced the natural deep-rooted grasses that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during periods of drought and high winds.
2.What were the causes of the dustbowl
The main causes of the dust bowl were extreme drought for eight years in total, and also very poor farming techniques on the behalf of the inhabitants. Normally crops are rotated (different crops are grown in an area each year or sometimes no crops at all) so as to never deplete soil too much. This was never done in the Dustbowl area, where the land was farmed to death leaving nothing to secure topsoil, creating this massive amount of dust to be blown huge distances by the wind.
3. Who did it effect the most?
People like farmers who poor people
4. What Part(s) of the country did it affect the most? (Dustbowl)
Mostly the Great Plains