Depression History

The chilling and little-known story of Adolf Hitler's eight-year march to the pinnacle of German politics. On the night of January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler leaned out of a spotlit window of the Reich chancellery in Berlin, bursting with joy. The moment seemed unbelievable, even to Hitler. After an...

Christopher Knowlton, author of Cattle Kingdom and former Fortune writer, takes an in-depth look at the spectacular Florida land boom of the 1920s and shows how it led directly to the Great Depression. The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse...

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman shows how today's crisis parallels the events that caused the Great Depression - and explains what it will take to avoid catastrophe. In 1999, Paul surveyed the economic crisis that had swept across Asia and Latin America, and warned that those crises...

Patricia Pearson returns to non-fiction with a witty, insightful and highly personal look at recognizing and coping with fears and anxieties in our contemporary world. The millions of North Americans who silently cope with anxiety at last have a witty, articulate champion in Patricia Pearson...

For four consecutive years Shirley Temple was the world’s box-office champion, a record never equaled. By early 1935 her mail was reported as four thousand letters a week, and hers was the second-most popular girl’s name in the country. What distinguished Shirley Temple from every other Hollywood star of the period - and everyone since - was how brilliantly she shone.

The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate Black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of Whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture.

The decade-long Great Depression, a period of shifts in the country's political and social landscape, forever changed the way America eats. Before 1929, America's relationship with food was defined by abundance. But the collapse of the economy, in both urban and rural America, left a quarter of all Americans out of work and undernourished - shattering long-held assumptions about the limitlessness of the national larder.

From Pulitzer Prize finalist John Fabian Witt comes the captivating secret history of an epic experiment to remake American democracy. Before the dark money of the Koch Brothers, before the billions of the Ford Foundation, there was the Garland Fund. In 1922, a young idealist named Charles...

At the height of the Great Depression, 250,000 teenagers were roaming America. Some left home because they felt they were a burden to their families; some fled homes shattered by the shame of unemployment and poverty; some left because it seemed a great adventure. Whether with the blessings of parents or as runaways, they hit the road and went in search of a better life. By summer 1932, the "roving boy" had become a fixture on the American landscape. The occasional girl was sighted, too, most passing unrecognized in male garb.

A fascinating, “rich, and generous” (Financial Times) look at the treatment of depression by an award-winning science writer that blends popular science, narrative history, and memoir. Is depression a persistent low mood, or is it a range of symptoms? Can it be expressed through a single...

In this “thrilling, heartbreaking” (Annie Lyons, author of The Air Raid Club) debut novel set during the Great Depression in 1930s New York, a daring dancer must take her twin brother’s place as a riveter high atop the in-progress Empire State Building to save her family from ruin...

In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows. The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since...

A beguiling blend of noir detective story and science fiction perfect for fans of Michael Chabon and Emily St. John Mandel, “this fiercely intelligent and utterly original debut” (Anna North, New York Times bestselling author) imagines a world where emotions have been weaponized, and a...

The untold story of how one woman's life was changed forever in a matter of seconds by a horrific trauma. Barbara Leaming's extraordinary and deeply sensitive biography is the first book to document Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' brutal, lonely and valiant thirty-one year struggle with...

★ “Historical fiction at its finest.” –The Horn Book “There has never been a better time to read about healing, of both the body and the heart.” –The New York Times Book Review Echo Mountain is an acclaimed best book of 2020! An NPR Best Book of the Year...

The central volume in the definitive biography of America's most important First Lady. "Engrossing" (Boston Globe). The captivating second volume of this Eleanor Roosevelt biography covers tumultuous era of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the gathering storms of World War II, the years...

Iain Lawrence is the best-selling author of such heralded books for young readers as Lord of the Nutcracker Men, which broached the complicated subject of human experience in war. His novels have been chosen as Best Book of the Year by

Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal on more than one occasion. Lawrence again contemplates war in this novel, set in 1943, England. Sixteen-year-old Kak escaped his abusive family in Canada to join the Canadian Air Force. Now a crewman aboard a night-flying bomber bound for Germany, Kak learns of the terror and violence of war firsthand.

The American economy is strong in large part because nobody believes that America would ever default on its debt. Yet in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt did just that, when in a bid to pull the country out of depression, he depreciated the US dollar in relation to gold, effectively annulling all debt contracts. American Default is the story of this forgotten chapter in America's history.

*A New York Times Critics' Best Book of 2018* *An Economist Best Book of 2018* *A Spectator Best Book of 2018* *A Mental Floss Best Book of 2018* An unprecedented history of the personality test conceived a century ago by a mother and her daughter--fiction writers with no formal training in...

In the best-selling tradition of The Devil in the White City, award-winning author Brian Hicks tells the explosive story of the Morro Castle, the elegant luxury liner that burned off the coast of New Jersey on September 7, 1934. The captain died under mysterious circumstances seven hours before his ship caught fire off the New Jersey coast.