This history of the Great Depression was prepared for The Cambridge Economic History of the United States. It describes real and imagined causes of the Depression, bank failures and deflation, the Fed and the gold standard, the start of recovery, the first New Deal, and the second New Deal. I...

This paper discusses parallels between our current recession and the Great Depression for the intelligent general public. It stresses the role of economic models and ideas in public policy and argues that gold-standard mentality still holds sway today. The parallels are greatest in the...