Notes Toward a Reappraisal of Depression Literature

Prospects ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 197-239
Author(s):  
Amy Godine

In a movie directed by Frank Capra toward the end of the Great Depression, an enterprising lady reporter with an eye for the photogenic persuades a down-and-out ballplayer to act the part of “John Doe,” “author” of her new syndicated front-page column, “I Protest!” The speeches that Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) pays the handsome hobo (Gary Cooper) to front are, if slightly sentimental, always provocative and immediately successful. They inveigh against the petty self-interest that in the name of rugged individualism has weakened and corrupted the cause of the common citizen in this country; they plead for a new spirit of grass-roots cooperative activism. “Tear down the fences,” John Doe implores his small-town audiences. “You're the hope of the world!”

1989 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-28
Author(s):  
Patricia A. Made ◽  
Nyorovai Whande

Five years ago, women in Africa moved to the center stage of the continent. The U.N. Decade for Women Conference held in Nairobi brought together women from all over the world to exchange ideas and discuss future strategies. African women turned out for the meeting in force. Women representing governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and grass-roots women's clubs converged on Nairobi to tell their story to other women in the common struggle for equality, justice and peace.


2019 ◽  
pp. 153-210
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck

This chapter recounts the early years of the Natchez Pilgrimage, a heritage tourism enterprise created by the Natchez Garden Club at the height of the Great Depression. The Pilgrimage dramatized a mix of decades-old southern racial ideology and white historical memory that was repackaged for 1930s consumption. Pilgrimage founder Katherine Miller and other leading clubwomen defined their community’s cultural image, while also redefining the meaning of traditional southern womanhood. The Pilgrimage is also the story of how one southern community’s selective expression of historical memory captivated white tourists eager to immerse themselves in the world of the Old South so vividly portrayed by popular writers and entertainers of the 1930s. The widespread appeal of the Pilgrimage home tours and pageant suggests the power of popular culture to shape a tenacious historical memory that remained in force for much of the twentieth century and lingers even today.


Author(s):  
David J. Nelson

Near the end of the Great Depression, Florida ends the decade with a triumphant tenure at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, dozens of thriving tourist attractions, and a newly built Florida Park Service. By 1940, Florida enjoyed a thriving tourist industry that attracted more than double the entire population of the Sunshine State.


2009 ◽  
Vol 108 (714) ◽  
pp. 20-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold James

We are likely to see more and more parallels with the political dynamics of the world of the Great Depression.


2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 1195-1212
Author(s):  
SCOTT F. ABRAMSON ◽  
SERGIO MONTERO

We develop and estimate a model of learning that accounts for the observed correlation between economic development and democracy and for the clustering of democratization events. In our model, countries’ own and neighbors’ past experiences shape elites’ beliefs about the effects of democracy on economic growth and their likelihood of retaining power. These beliefs influence the choice to transition into or out of democracy. We show that learning is crucial to explaining observed transitions since the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, our model predicts reversals to authoritarianism if the world experienced a growth shock the size of the Great Depression.


2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bordo ◽  
Harold James

In the discussion of our contemporary economic disease, the Great Depression analogy refuses to go away. Almost every policy-maker referred to conditions that had ‘not been seen since the Great Depression’, even before the failure of Lehman. Some even went further – the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England notably called the crisis the worst ‘financial crisis in human history’. In its April 2009 World Economic Outlook, the IMF looked explicitly at the analogy not only in the collapse of financial confidence, but also in the rapid decline of trade and industrial activity across the world. In general, history rather than economic theory seems to offer a guide in interpreting wildly surprising and inherently unpredictable events. Some observers, notably Paul Krugman, have concluded that a Dark Age of macroeconomics has set in.


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