The Great Depression for Busy People: The Essential Guide to the Crash, the Bread Lines, and the New Deal That Remade America (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798188126070)

In 1929 the richest country on earth fell apart, and for a decade it could not get back up. Almost everyone knows the images: the ticker, the bread line, the dust storm rolling over a farm. Almost no one can explain what actually happened, or why.

The Great Depression for Busy People gives you the entire arc in a few clear hours, in one straight line from the boom of the 1920s to the war economy of 1941. No jargon. No lectures about which party was right. Just the real story of how a stock-market crash became a decade of ruin, and how America finally climbed out.

Inside this book:

• What actually caused the Depression, and why the crash alone did not have to
• Why it lasted so long: the bank failures, the vanishing money, the debt trap, and the gold standard
• What Herbert Hoover really did, beyond the do-nothing myth
• What Franklin Roosevelt changed, from the bank holiday to the New Deal to Social Security
• What honestly ended it, gold, money, and the war, and why the debate still runs
• The human story throughout: the Hoovervilles, the Dust Bowl, and the people who lived it

Fair to every side, clear about what is settled and what is still argued, and written to be read with pleasure, this is the one short book that hands a busy reader the whole shape of the decade that remade America.