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The Great Depression: Introduction

I. Course structure and requirements: Described on the syllabus.  I suggest that you bookmark it. The syllabus will link to individual class session outlines, assignment information, etc.

II. Themes

    A. Economic collapse: Why?  Why so severe?  Why so long?

    B. The personal experience of economic depression.  The worst of times?  The best of times?

    C. The West and California: What was the regional impact of crisis?  New Deal and Economic Development.  Migrations to and from California.   California as "Endangered Dream"? 

    D. Depression legacies: Economic boom and memories of hard times.  The proper role of the Federal government.  Towards a new politics of rights?

World War I and Its Unsettling Settlement

I. The Great War and the "Second Thirty Years War"

    A. The "War to End all Wars"

    B. Global revolution or global restoration?

    C. Versailles: War guilt, reparations, war debt

Read a brief excerpt from John Maynard Keynes's attack on the peace settlements, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920). 

II. The International Context of the 1920s

   A. An end to Globalization?

   B. Germany from Hyperinflation to Depression
        Watch a brief video clip on German hyperinflation from a recent PBS series.

    C.  The Return to Gold--Great Britain, 1925 
         (A brief lesson on the International Gold Standard)

Hyperinflation in Germany, 1923