Great Depression

The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn that lasted from 1929 to 1939. The period was marked by high unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and business failures around the world. The economic contagion began in the United States, then the largest economy in the world, with the devastating Wall Street crash of 1929, often considered the start of the Depression; among the countries with the most unemployment were the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. By 1933 the United States unemployment rate had risen to 25 percent, about a third of American farmers had lost their land, and 9,000 of the country's 25,000 banks had failed. The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 ended the Depression, as war production stimulated factories and absorbed large numbers of unemployed young men into the military.