The Great Depression in a Modern Mirror

Abstract

In this paper I ask not how scholarship on the Great Depression informed the policy response to the Great Recession, but rather how the experience of the Great Recession will inform scholarship on the Great Depression. “Every generation writes its own history of the past,” the historian H.M. Stephens of the University of California, Berkeley observed in his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1916. In this spirit, I will ask how the current generation is likely to rewrite the history of the 1920s and 1930s given the crisis through which we just lived.