I have quite a strong background on American History, but I’ve just realized I don’t actually know the mechanics of why the Depression happened. Does anyone have any ideas for a book that would cover it, isn’t too boring (this is just for my personal education), and isn’t oral histories about what life was like at that point (I’m mostly just interested in the politics and economics of the issue)?
So, should I take it that this isn’t a subject much written about, or is it just not that popular to read about?
Just around the corner : a highly selective history of the thirties / Robert Bendiner [1967]
I would have thought with all the speculation about our current economy, there would have been something a little more recent.
1929: The Year of the Great Crash by William Klingaman.
It is a period that is oddly underreported. There’s a new WWII book out every week, but next to nothing on the Depression. I realize that WWII is more exciting, but there was plenty about the Depression era that’s fascinating.
There’s always Fredrick Lewis Allen’s Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America
The classic study: John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929.
This is what I’m finding out, and it’s really a surprise. Is it a sign that American historians only like to concentrate on the triumphs of history and not the failures? (the huge numbers of books on Vietnam would seem to go against that, though)
I saw that one, but not being an economist I was a little intimidated. Is it accessible to the non-economist?
I read it, and yes, it is accessible to the general reader. It was a best seller in 1955, and hasn’t been out of print since then. Galbraith wrote a new introduction in 1997. If you go to the Amazon link, you can read the first six pages of the book.
(When I worked at a hotel years ago, I checked in Galbraith, who was talking about a party he had just been at where he met “Yookoo Oono”.)
Cool! Thanks for the tips all!
I checked my shelves and next to Galbraith’s book I have another classic from that era, The Perils of Prosperity 1914-1932 by William E. Leuchtenburg.
And if you click on the link to Galbraith, check out all the other links to Depression books on that page. There are bunches of them, all more recent.
The following are gut-level books about the effect of The Depression on representative American families, not economic history.
It’s fiction, not history, but John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is worth reading.
James Agee and Walker Evan’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a landmark of sorts. You’ve seen this picture. It’s an account of time Agee and Evans spent time with three rural families in Alabama in 1936. Recommended.
Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ is a good fictional book set during the Depression.
Frederick Lewis Allen’s “Since Yesterday” is a good non-fiction. It’s not economic history and deals a lot more with the effects rather than the causes of the depression.
And Woody Guthrie wrote tons of great songs about life during the Depression. Listen to his “Dustbowl Ballads” album.
http://www.mises.org/store/product1.asp?SID=2&Product_ID=63
Murray Rothbard’s AMERICA’S GREAT DEPRESSION- an Austrian School (libertarian) look at the subject. I haven’t been able to get my hands on it yet but it’s definitely a different perspective than the GD as a failure of capitalism corrected by massive gov’t intervention.