Great Depression

Does the current financial crisis resemble the run-up to the Great Depression? You betcha, some experts say. Decide for yourself with a look at history - and Ben S. Bernanke's book - at these sites. Teaching history. The project of the Center for History and New Media looks to be a resource for classroom discussion that might compare the Great Depression to today. It links to videos on demand from Annenberg Media's Learner.org, where you can watch explainers about booms and busts, monetary policy, inflation, stagflation, and economist John Maynard Keynes, among others.

Father is working long hours at the factory while mother has been trying to find a job of her own. But there are none. People line the streets for a bowl of soup; no one can afford anything more than that. At home, the children do not have shoes or adequate clothing. There is not enough money for coal, for beds, or to pay rent. This is how the world remembers the Great Depression 80 years ago. Today's recession looks like a stray cat compared with the Depression's roaring lion of the late 1920s and '30s.

Making a television show about the Depression that is entertaining and informative without being gloomy and depressing is not an easy task. But the History Channel, again demonstrating its expertise and facility with real-life happenings, has done it. The Great Depression will air in four one-hour episodes, tonight through Thursday night at 9, on HIST. The near-perfect host is former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo. He demonstrates his fitness in his opening remarks, as he uses his own experience to illustrate how families so often helped one another through the trying and frightening 1930s: "My father had lost his job as a ditch digger when construction work virtually stopped after the [stock market]

Back in the late '30s, when the government began to sponsor the arts as a way of fighting the Great Depression, stage plays were used as a means of propaganda to make the people more socially responsive. It may have helped, but it wasn't until the nation began to gear itself for World War II that the economy was pulled out of the doldrums and good jobs mushroomed everywhere. It was a form of socialism in warrior's garb. It worked and we have had no serious economic failings since those days.

"From one democracy - two definitions of liberty, each in conflict with the other. " Narrator Joe Morton's squib of a comment about the government's role in securing freedom for its citizens sums up the tension that provides the underpinning for PBS's ambitious The Great Depression, a seven-hour documentary that begins tomorrow on Channels 12 and 39. It might also summarize the tension that has powered most of the economic and social history...

Historically, economic recessions such as the Great Depression, the Oil Crisis of the 1970s, and our current recession were brought on by many factors, but all served as a much-needed reality check on the American need to overindulge. One of the main causes of the Great Depression was factory overproduction. The high demand for cars and entertainment outlets such as radios and movies created a "great glut" out of American industry. More demand led to more innovation, and soon enough, more cost and time effective labor-saving machines replaced American workers, and increased unemployment.

THE COUNTRY is in economic quicksand, and no solution is in sight. Infusions of literally trillions of dollars, the nonstop printing of cheap money and the president's refusal to rid himself of advisers whose advice has proven ineffective have put the U.S. economy in an intractable position. Only two industries are thriving - pro sports and gambling venues. How long can they dodge the bullet? The Great Depression was canceled by World War II. It's a different ballgame today.

I AM A GUEST in Herb Mandel's time machine, which has landed us on 10th Street above Susquehanna Avenue in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although Philadelphia and America were back on their heels, it was the happiest period of Herb's life, as childhood is meant to be. In the foreword to a self-published book of vignettes and watercolor sketches, the 85-year-old retired teacher and artist writes that "the reality of the Great Depression was...

Stocks dived in 1987. They slumped through most of the 1970s. But in our collective memories, there is only one Great Crash: 1929. To many Americans, that cosmic crash is so closely associated with the Great Depression that every market downturn since tends to raise the specter of recession or depression. With the Dow Jones industrial average and other major market indexes once again falling sharply, it seems worth asking whether drops in stock prices can topple the economy.

The hard times of many Americans will be reviewed when a series of book discussions on the Great Depression, called Americans in the '30s, begins in early October at the Camden County Library in Voorhees. The registration deadline is Sept. 15 for the five-part series, which is co-sponsored by Camden County College and financed through the New Jersey Committee for the Humanities. Participants in the free series will read and discuss five books that deal with various aspects of the 1930s.

Since the Great Recession of 2008, many have said that America's time as the leading power of the globe is past. Mark Steyn's best-selling After America: Get Ready for Armaged don offers the bracing budgetary fact that "we need $15 trillion just to be flat broke. " Thomas Friedman of the New York Times regularly suggests that China's high-speed trains and other modern accoutrements provide a stark contrast between the ever-progressing People's Republic and the physically and intellectually decaying American one. To underscore the reality of our decline, President Obama, who more than any past leader has spoken of America's many failings (real and imagined)

Kat Aaron is a project editor with the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University in Washington Some call this moment the Great Recession. As the hardship has lingered, others have begun calling it the Little Depression. But equating the hard times of the 1930s with the hard times of today is mostly overblown rhetoric. Or is it? On the surface, the comparisons are obvious: a period of great wealth and exuberance followed by a stock market crash. After the crash, widespread economic pain.

You can learn a lot from your parents, but when it comes to investing, you might want to be skeptical about mimicking them. A recent survey of Generation Y shows that many 18- to 30-year-olds have been so unnerved by the savagery of the stock market in the last few years that they are investing as conservatively as their parents and grandparents. Young investors may be playing it so safe with 401(k) and other retirement savings that they will position themselves far short. According to the MFS Investing Sentiment Survey by the Research Collaborative, 40 percent of Generation Y has concluded, "I will never feel comfortable investing in the stock market.

I AM A GUEST in Herb Mandel's time machine, which has landed us on 10th Street above Susquehanna Avenue in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although Philadelphia and America were back on their heels, it was the happiest period of Herb's life, as childhood is meant to be. In the foreword to a self-published book of vignettes and watercolor sketches, the 85-year-old retired teacher and artist writes that "the reality of the Great Depression was...

THE COUNTRY is in economic quicksand, and no solution is in sight. Infusions of literally trillions of dollars, the nonstop printing of cheap money and the president's refusal to rid himself of advisers whose advice has proven ineffective have put the U.S. economy in an intractable position. Only two industries are thriving - pro sports and gambling venues. How long can they dodge the bullet? The Great Depression was canceled by World War II. It's a different ballgame today.

Father is working long hours at the factory while mother has been trying to find a job of her own. But there are none. People line the streets for a bowl of soup; no one can afford anything more than that. At home, the children do not have shoes or adequate clothing. There is not enough money for coal, for beds, or to pay rent. This is how the world remembers the Great Depression 80 years ago. Today's recession looks like a stray cat compared with the Depression's roaring lion of the late 1920s and '30s.

Historically, economic recessions such as the Great Depression, the Oil Crisis of the 1970s, and our current recession were brought on by many factors, but all served as a much-needed reality check on the American need to overindulge. One of the main causes of the Great Depression was factory overproduction. The high demand for cars and entertainment outlets such as radios and movies created a "great glut" out of American industry. More demand led to more innovation, and soon enough, more cost and time effective labor-saving machines replaced American workers, and increased unemployment.

Herman "Reds" Bassman, who played for the Eagles during the Great Depression, died Tuesday in Petersburg, Va. He was 97 and had been the oldest living Eagles player. Bassman played eight games in 1936 as a tailback and defensive back after leaving Ursinus. The Birds, in their third season, went 1-11, in an eight-team NFL. "We were the generation that started it all, so playing for the Eagles is definitely one of my best memories," Bassman said during a 2007 interview with the Progress-Index in Virginia.

As if he needed another policy concern to distract him from the health-care debate, President Obama now finds himself embroiled in a quarrel with China over his imposition of a steep tariff on automobile tires from China that is to take effect this week. The Chinese have responded by threatening to impose higher tariffs on American chicken. This may seem like a petty dispute, but the controversy could endanger the global economic recovery if the underlying issue - the rise in protectionism - is not resolved quickly and forcefully.

Try these headlines: "STOCKS CRASH, PANIC FOLLOWS," "BANKS FAIL, RIOTS ENSUE. " Who would have thought the rerelease of Charlie Chaplin's darkly comic Monsieur Verdoux would be so terrifyingly timely? From a story idea by Orson Welles, Monsieur Verdoux is the tale of a bank clerk (Chaplin) who loses his job during the Great Depression and crafts a new career as a bigamist serial killer - he marries women with money, murders them, and lives off the proceeds. An opening scene that is stiff, stagy, and a setup for the plot to come is pretty much the only flaw in this sly, existential black-and-white classic.