• About this Book

Written by Robert S. McElvaine

• Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press
• On Sale: December 6, 1993
• Price: $16.95
• ISBN: 978-0-8129-2327-8 (0-8129-2327-8)

about this book

When this work was first published in 1985, Anthony Lewis wrote, "Robert McElvaine has gone beneath the skin of the Great Depression.  His fascinating book illuminates the human consequences of economic and political folly."  Today The Great Depression remains a definitive text.  McElvaine has undertaken a major revision of the book to bring it fully up-to-date with the latest scholarship and developments on the national political and economic scene.

"Fair-minded, incisive, thoroughly informed, and eminently readable, The Great Depression is a fine account of the ordeal of the 1930s--one that does justice to the social and cultural dimensions of economic crisis as well as to its political and economic impact."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Table of Contents

1. Historical Currents and the Great Depression
2. Who Was Roaring in the Twenties?--Origins of the Great Depression
3. In the Right Place at the Wrong Time?--Herbert Hoover
4. Nature Takes Its Course: The First Years of the Depression
5. The Lord of the Manor: FDR
6. "And What Was Dead Was Hope": 1932 and the Interregnum
7. "Action, and Action Now": The Hundred Days and Beyond
8. "Fear Itself": Depression Life
9. Moral Economics: American Values and Culture in the Great Depression
10. Thunder on the Left: Rising Unrest, 1934-35
11. "I'm That Kind of Liberal Because I'm That Kind of Conservative": The Second New Deal
12. New Hickory: The WPA, the Election of 1936, and the Court Fight
13. The CIO and the Later New Deal
14. "Dr. New Deal" Runs Out of Medicine: The Last Years of the Depression, 1939-1941
15. Perspective: The Great Depression and Modern America