timescale.infoThe Great Depression, 1929–1941
The Great Depression in the United States and around the world: the boom of the 1920s and its cracks, the Crash of 1929 and the market's three-year fall, the banking panics, the European crisis and the end of the gold standard, the Hoover years and the Bonus Army, the Dust Bowl, Roosevelt's New Deal, the court fight and the recession of 1937–38, the culture of the decade, and the war economy that ended it. **How to read it.** Chapter headings mark the stages. Presidencies, programs, panics, droughts, recessions and the market's slide are durations; everything else is a moment, tagged by thread (market, banking, policy, politics, world, labor, farm, culture, economy). Related moments are linked: a cause and what it led to. **Dates and figures.** Local days, shown at a fixed UTC−5, New York's standard time, so the Crash's market hours read as Wall Street's. The business cycle follows the NBER's dates (to the month); unemployment rates are the Bureau of Labor Statistics' later annual estimates, placed at mid-year. Where a date or a figure is approximate, its dating note or its notes say so. A sample timeline built from the cited sources (Wikipedia, the NBER, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Federal Reserve's history essays, the National Archives and others); not a definitive history.
121 moments · 1920-01-01T00:00:00-05:00 CE – 1954-11-23T00:00:00-05:00 CE · by @athan · @athan
Unemployment: 3.2%
**3.2%** of the civilian labor force out of work, about **1.6 million** people, in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' estimates (Stanley Lebergott's, the basis of Historical Statistics' series). No one measured unemployment directly at the time: these are later estimates, and others who count relief workers as employed put the 1930s lower.