The Great Depression

I would love to write a long post sometime soon. But I'm busy with the process of transition in a time when that's not really the best place to be. So it goes. That said though, I'll invite you to spend a little time today by joining me in some educational reading. I've never really doubted George Santayana's adage that, "Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it."

Anyone involved in education today can tell you that a general awareness of world history is anything but a strong point among today's youth. The arguable failure of our current school system to educate our populace in genuinely useful ways that have anything but immediate applicability will be the subject of another post, but in the meantime, I'll invite you to chew on this with me:

The Great Depression was a worldwide economic downturn starting in most places in 1929 and ending at different times in the 1930s or early 1940s for different countries. It was the largest and most important economic depression in modern history, and is used in the 21st century as an example of how far the world's economy can fall.^[1] The Great Depression originated in the United States; historians most often use as a starting date the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday. The end of the depression in the U.S is associated with the onset of the war economy of World War II, beginning around 1939.^[2]

The depression had devastating effects in virtually every country, rich or poor. International trade plunged by half to two-thirds, as did personal income, tax revenue, prices and profits. Cities all around the world were hit hard, especially those dependent on heavy industry. Construction was virtually halted in many countries. Farming and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by roughly 60 percent.^[3][4][5] Facing plummeting demand with few alternate sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector industries such as farming, mining and logging suffered the most.^[6] However, even shortly after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, optimism persisted; John D. Rockefeller said that "These are days when many are discouraged. In the 93 years of my life, depressions have come and gone. Prosperity has always returned and will again."^[7]

The Great Depression ended at different times in different countries; for subsequent history see Home front during World War II. The majority of countries set up relief programs, and most underwent some sort of political upheaval, pushing them to the left or right. In some states, the desperate citizens turned toward nationalist demagogues—the most infamous being Adolf Hitler—setting the stage for World War II in 1939.

Yes, it is from Wikipedia, alternately lamented as the bane of serious research and yet linked and referred to without restraint by many of the same people who warn against it. I tell my students simply, "It's a beginning." This article is as heavily footnoted as any. If you're uncomfortable with Wikipedia as a source of information, then go buy any of the dozens of books in the "Further Reading" list for this article. But, as a primer on what we've been through already and what more and more people are coming to realize we are facing again, but in even more devastating breadth thanks to a world economy more "global" than ever, this is not a bad place to start.

Wikipedia: The Great Depression

Who Said What

I had thought about titling that last post, "Hell Hath No Fury . . . " But upon looking up the quote, I learned, oddly enough, that it didn't originate where I thought. Even better, I found that a number of other "quotes" I thought I knew well, also didn't come from the sources I was accustomed to crediting for them. While I recognize that the internet overfloweth with bad information, and only at great risk should anyone consider it the last word on anything, I've found over the years that, with regard to matters other than political biographies, sites such as Wikipedia are generally fairly reliable.

I hope the same may be said of Wikiquote, from which the samples below come. With that in mind, and the caveat that I've not done the personal research to confirm the validity of even the examples I'll offer, here are some tidbits from a page dedicated to some of the most frequently misattributed and misquoted "quotes." When you have a little time to kill, you might peruse the page simply for the fun of it.

• "Just the facts, Ma'am." Never actually uttered on Dragnet.
• "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Not from Shakespeare.
• "Only the dead have seen the end of war." Not from Plato.

Admittedly, many of the quotes listed on the page are not misattributed, but only "misquoted," in that they are paraphrases, capturing the meaning of the original, if not the exact wording. Still, it's an interesting page on which to kill a few minutes and learn a few things.

"It is the world's blog."

Wikipedia was the topic when Professor Alan Liu closed a long post with those words.

I seem to be working my way backwards here, and doing it in some haste, because I get wordy when I wax professorial. But, this seemed an appropriate topic, considering that I frequently link to Wikipedia articles in these posts. Don't think, however, that I do it without a good solid knowledge of that resource's strengths and limitations.

To that end, I encourage the interested to investigate the two following links.

The first is to an article from Inside Higher Education, a publication that, despite my no longer spending much of each day in the classroom, I remain subscribed to, at least electronically. Titled, "A Stand Against Wikipedia," it details some of the problems faced by those of us who (forgive me if I slip into present tense) strive to teach students the difference between a good and a mediocre or sometimes even bad source. Wikipedia can be, emphatically, all three. As with so many things, it depends. Thus the title of the second post, Liu's, "To the Student, Appropriate Use of Wikipedia" (the key word being appropriate). Some years ago, when I directed the entire freshman comp course at the school where I taught, I strongly discouraged my colleagues from outright outlawing of just about anything. Judgement, it seemed, was one of the things we were striving to develop in our charges, and a healthy skepticism of universals was one of the first steps toward developing that judgement. Universals, like stereotypes and prejudices, short circuit the judgement process. And Liu, studiously avoids that pitfall.

So if you love Wikipedia, or if you hate it, you're likely to learn something either way by following those links and listening. And if you have to choose, I'd go with Liu's piece first--it's good advice for anyone. The other, on the problems of academics (the two-legged variety; not the topic as a whole), is more interesting to, well, academics.