US History

Selma — Breaking the Grip of Fear (Jan-June)

March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom (Aug)

Birmingham Church Bombing (Sept)

FBI's COINTELPRO Targets the Movement (Oct)

Freedom Day in Selma (Oct)

Assasination of President Kennedy (Nov)

Voter Registration Movement Expands in Mississippi (Spring

One response to the depression was military dictatorship

collapse in raw material and agricultural commodity prices led to social unrest,

fascism and militarism

Hitler outlawed labor unions

restructured German

industry into a series of cartels

massive program of military rearmament

totalitarian communism.

Stalin's

welfare capitalism

Canada

Great Britain

France

the economic decline brought on by the Depression was steeper and more protracted in the United States.

European countries significantly reduced unemployment by 1936. However, the American jobless rate still exceeded 17 percent as late as 1939, when World War II began in Europe. It did not drop below 14 percent until 1941.

It produced a major political realignment

committed, to varying degrees, to interventionist government.

60 percent of the nation's families earned less than $2,000 a year

Prosperity bypassed specific groups of Americans entirely.

The farm sector had been mired in depression since 1921

The decline in farm income reverberated throughout the economy.

Between 1920 and 1929, more than 5,000 of the country's 30,000 banks failed.

small businesspeople failed because they could not secure loans.

consumer debt also weakened the economy

poor distribution of income

During the 1920s, there was a pronounced shift in wealth and income toward the very rich

poorest 93 percent of the non-farm population actually saw its disposable income fall.

business investment had begun to decline.

housing starts

1924 immigration law

Soaring inventories

reduce investment and production

stock market speculation

The Federal Reserve, the nation's central bank, played a critical, if inadvertent, role in weakening the economy.

allowed the money supply to fall dramatically

"liquidity crisis."

the Federal Reserve allowed the country's money supply to decline by 27 percent between 1929 and 1933.

tariff policies damaged the economy by depressing foreign trade

Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922

Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930

By 1933, international trade had plunged 30 percent.

the United States had no federal system of unemployment insurance.

Community Ches

Red Cross

that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. . .

declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety

we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States

Our policy in regard to Europe

is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers;

It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent without endangering our peace and happiness; nor can anyone believe that our southern brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord

the early 1790s, slavery appeared to be a dying institution. Slave imports into the New World were declining and slave prices were falling because the crops grown by slaves--tobacco, rice, and indigo--did not generate enough income to pay for their upkeep.

The Plantation Legend

the South was, in reality, a diverse and complex region

large parts of the South were unsuitable for plantation life

Unlike the slave societies of the Caribbean, which produced crops exclusively for export, the South devoted much of its energy to raising food and livestoc

Piedmont, Tidewater, coastal plain, piney woods, Delta, Appalachian Mountains, upcountry, and a fertile black belt--regions that clashed repeatedly over such political questions as debt relief, taxes, apportionment of representation, and internal improvements.

Large slaveholders were extremely rare. In 1860 only 11,000 Southerners, three-quarters of one percent of the white population owned more than 50 slaves; a mere 2,358 owned as many as 100 slaves. However, although large slaveholders were few in number, they owned most of the South’s slaves. Over half of all slaves lived on plantations with 20 or more slaves and a quarter lived on plantations with more than 50 slaves.

These slaveowners were a diverse lot. A few were African American, mulatto, or Native American; one-tenth were women; and more than one in ten worked as artisans, businesspeople, or merchants rather than as farmers or planters. Few led lives of leisure or refinement.

The average slaveowner lived in a log cabin rather than a mansion and was a farmer rather than a planter. The average holding varied between four and six slaves, and most slaveholders possessed no more than five.

The southern economy generated enormous wealth and was critical to the economic growth of the entire United States. Well over half of the richest 1 percent of Americans in 1860 lived in the South. Even more important, southern agriculture helped finance early 19th century American economic growth. Before the Civil War, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s cotton, provided over half of all U.S. export earnings, and furnished 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Cotton exports paid for a substantial share of the capital and technology that laid the basis for America’s industrial revolution.

1860 the North had approximately 1.3 million industrial workers, whereas the South had 110,000, and northern factories manufactured nine-tenths of the industrial goods produced in the United States.

1850, 20 percent of all southern white adults could not read or write, while the illiteracy rate in New England was less than half of 1 percent.

1850, 17 percent of the farming population held two-thirds of all acres in the rich cotton-growing regions of the South.

Louisiana, for example, nearly half of all rural white families owned no land. During the 1850s, the percentage of the total white population owning slaves declined significantly. By 1860, the proportion of whites holding slaves had fallen from about one-third to one-fourth.