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This article examines the role of the Great Depression in shaping the intergenerational mobility of some of the most upwardly mobile cohorts of the twentieth century. Using newly linked census and vital records from the Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-database, we examine the occupational and educational mobility of more than 265,000 sons and daughters born in Ohio and North Carolina. We find that the deepest and most protracted downturn in U.S. history had limited effects on sons intergenerational mobility but reduced daughters intergenerational mobility.

This paper employs quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the link between banking competition, branching and financial distress during the interwar period in Europe, focusing on Italy as a case study. Regression analysis and a systematic review of printed sources show that banks experiencing distress had opened scores of branches and operated in areas with harsher competition. Poor managerial choices led banks to have higher operational costs, pushing them to more remunerative but riskier activities. The 1920s saw a profound transformation of the Italian banking system, with extensive branch expansion and cut‐throat competition for deposits. This paper argues that these changes in the structure of the banking system rendered it more fragile when the international crisis hit. Available evidence on other European countries suggests that Italy was not an isolated case. The study contributes to the literature on banking crises during the Great Depression and the effects of banking competition on financial stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In US literary history, the Great Depression stands as a wellspring of poetry and prose that imagines homelessness otherwise, that reads the embodiments and relationalities of homeless dispossession as an abolitionist horizon, cutting across the structural, epistemic violence of urban sociology, welfare bureaucracy, and the carceral state as well as practicing radical alternatives of relating to housing. Arguably influenced by discourses on subproletarian pathology, myriad Depression‐era writers regarded the homeless as bereft of futurity, and they understood the condition of unhoused immiseration as a state of social death that marked the homeless as kinless. This literary vein conceived of homelessness as a disgendering experience in which the homeless body becomes an aberration from the heteropatriarchal gender binary. Alongside this literature of homeless nonfuturity, this article locates a literary countercurrent that explores how homeless persons continue to build kinships and collective futures that manifest through and exceed their bare existence. In particular, the article examines the poem "Homeless but Not Motherless" (1935) and the novel The Girl (ca. 1939), finding in both a recognition not only of the disgendering violence of homelessness but also of the potentialities for forging kinship across exclusions from labor, housing, family, and civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the establishment of banking supervision in Italy and its operation between 1926 and 1936, using a narrative approach based on previously classified documents from the Bank of Italy's Historical Archives. This case is particularly interesting from the international perspective, Italy having been the first European country to assign substantial supervision to its central bank, a few years before the 1929 crisis. Notwithstanding insufficient regulation and a light touch concerning the four major mixed banks, we document considerable enforcement of the law, which went beyond the initial provisions, thanks to the rather proactive supervisory approach adopted by the Bank of Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text explores the views of the Czech immigrant community in the US on the 1929 New York Stock Exchange crash through Czech newspapers from Chicago, Nebraska, and Texas, using a comparative approach to analyse the publications.

The article analyzes production Tobacco Road based on the play by Jack Kirkland, a stage version of Erskine Caldwell’s novel. Staged at the height of the Great Depression, this production had been run on stage for nine years until 1947, remaining the highest-grossing production in the history of the American Theatre. Critics' reviews ranged from delight to rejection, and the authorities of many states opposed its run as an obscene and blasphemous production. The article examines the peculiarities of the play, created by Jack Kirkland, who turned with novel social significance into a slapstick comedy. The play, where the crackers kneaded real dirt on stage and vividly exchanged comic lines, contained a physical score of gags. The actors — the leading character, Jeeter Lester, stood out among them — performed in an eccentric mode. Such things that frightened Americans during the era of an unprecedented economic crisis as poverty, hunger, early marriage, cruelty and promiscuity, being taken to an absurd extreme, evoked during performance not fear but laughter. Photographs of the production, critical reviews and the text of the play allow to reconstruct Tabacco Road and also to compare it with the film adaptation (1941), which had become a response to the unprecedented success of the production. The huge contrast in the type of comic — the sentimental comedy by John Ford and the slapstick comedy/farce staged by Anthony Brown — makes it possible to detect the difference between cinema, restrained by the Hays censorship code, and the theater. Allowing one to laugh at the most monstrous social phenomena, the “dirty” production (such was its reputation) had become a kind of therapy for millions of spectators in the 1930s.

Thomas Sutpen's descent from the mountains in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), a fall from the mountain paradise to the evils of slaveholding society, has long been considered comparable to the biblical Fall of Man. Surprisingly, however, the social, moral, and political overtones of Sutpen's Fall have been critically overlooked to a certain extent. This article explores Sutpen's descent from the mountains as well as the innocence that informs his design in order to showcase the full extent of Faulkner's metaphor of the Fall. I contend that the examination of Sutpen's Fall from a moral and sociological standpoint establishes an ideologically profound context in which the ethical and socioeconomic implications of Thomas Sutpen's story can be thoroughly investigated. Specifically, the article identifies Sutpen's commitment to his self-interest at the expense of others as his major transgression. For this reason, it maintains that the implications of Sutpen's story transcend the literary boundaries of the novel's nineteenth century timeframe and also comment insightfully on the moral and socioeconomic situation of the Great Depression, the devastating period within which Absalom, Absalom! was authored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the gardening work of prairie women in the context of farming difficulties and agricultural rehabilitation on the Canadian Prairies in the 1930s and 1940s. It is based on analysis of gardening coverage in the Western Producer (a prairie periodical aimed at English-speaking farm families) and engagement with the records of federal government officials involved in the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration and the Experimental Farms Service. The article establishes the significance of women's gardening work and its important role in agricultural rehabilitation. In doing so, the article makes clear the ambition underlying agricultural rehabilitation, a federal government project intended to help protect permanent homes for settler families on the Canadian Prairies. Contributing to the understudied topics of rural experiences in women's history and of women's experiences in environmental history and the history of knowledge, the article illustrates the importance of considering gendered knowledge from below in grappling with the consolidation of agricultural colonization on the Canadian Prairies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nestled at the southern tip of Lake Michigan, East Chicago, Indiana, became the site of massive-scale industrialization in the early twentieth century. This effort, in turn, fueled massive-scale migration into the region. During the 1919 Great Steel Strike, the steel industry began to recruit thousands of ethnic Mexicans to serve as steelworkers and laborers across the region. Institutional and community forces segregated the ethnic Mexican community into a portion of the city called Indiana Harbor. Within this neighborhood, individuals worked to forge a community complete with institutions such as Catholic churches, a Spanish-language newspaper, and businesses. However, city planners and potential residents came to believe that the community represented a problem for the city's growth. In the 1930s, members of East Chicago's American Legion Post 266 orchestrated a repatriation campaign to alleviate the financial burden of public relief. The campaign targeted the ethnic Mexican community, whose presence was labelled as undesirable and a potential source of job competition in the region's exhausted economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the contributions of Ralph Hawtrey to monetary theory and macroeconomics, focusing on his monetary business cycle theory and his monetary explanation of the Great Depression. Unlike Milton Friedman's US‐centred explanation of the Great Depression, Hawtrey's was focused on the international gold standard that collapsed with the outset of World War I and the attempt to restore it. Hawtrey urged that, after restoration of the gold standard, increased monetary demand for gold be restrained to prevent gold appreciation and deflation. But deliberate French gold accumulation in 1928 and interest‐rate increases by the Federal Reserve, led to the ruinous deflation foreseen by Hawtrey. The article then critically evaluates recent discussions of Hawtrey's contributions in books by Hetzel (2023) and Mattei (2022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before becoming a writer, Eudora Welty started out as a photographer. Recruited for Roosevelt's New Deal by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) news service, she reported on the crisis in Mississippi in 1936, producing a body of images that would not be published until half a century later. This article examines the specificity of Welty’s visual rhetoric, in the political, social and cultural context of the Great Depression and in particular the way she addressed the color line issue, with her approach echoing Emily Dickinson’s verse: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”.

We explore the socioeconomic experience of a group of south Indian Tamil laborers and their families who established the Chuah Tamil agricultural settlement in British Malaya during the Great Depression. These were laborers who, though unemployed, refused to be repatriated to south India. Progressing from subsistence farming to small-scale agricultural production, their settlement evolved into an organized, socioeconomic system. It was also a critical field experiment for the British to assess the viability of a self-generating labor pool. In this article, we examine the social history of the settlers and the development of the Chuah Tamil colony within the context of Britain's overarching desire to create a labor source. Our study contributes to the reconciliation of microsocial history and colonialism, as well as to global labor history more broadly, by situating the settlers' experience and the settlement itself in relation to historical contemporaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the long-run mortality effects of in utero and early-life economic conditions. We examine how local economic conditions experienced during the Great Depression, proxied by county-level banking deposits during in utero and first years of life, influences old-age longevity. We find that a one-standard-deviation rise in per capita bank deposits is associated with an approximately 1.7 month increase in males’ longevity at old age. Additional analyses comparing state-level versus county-level economic measures provide insight on the importance of controlling for local-level confounders and exploiting more granular measures when exploring the relationship between early-life conditions and later-life mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The difference between the representation of German femininity in the 1920s and the 1930s is striking: while glamorous flappers with bob haircuts ruled the beginning of the interwar period, its end is characterized by serious and earnest—and often longhaired—young women. Rather than taking the obvious route of relating this change to the political changes in Germany, most importantly the rise of the Nazis, this article argues that the changing representation of interwar femininity in Germany was always embedded in a transnational, transatlantic process. The transformation of flappers into humble girls started well before the Nazis came to power and was fueled by a wide variety of voices, from communist to bourgeois actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world-wide economic depression of 1929-1934 also bore down heavily on small-town financial institutions. A case in point was that of the Graaff-Reinet Board of Executors (established 1856) and the Midland Agency and Trust Company of Graaff-Reinet. A severe blow to their financial viability had been Great Britain's going off the gold standard on 21 September 1931. The Midland Agency was able to survive but the Board of Executors collapsed - the first such instance in South Africa during the great depression. It closed its doors on 20 October 1931 and was thereafter placed under judicial management. One result of this collapse was the introduction of the Companies Amendment Bill into the 1932 parliamentary session by Dr K. Bremer, MP for Graaff-Reinet.

This article examines the role of the Great Depression in shaping the intergenerational mobility of some of the most upwardly mobile cohorts of the twentieth century. Using newly linked census and vital records from the Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-database, we examine the occupational and educational mobility of more than 265,000 sons and daughters born in Ohio and North Carolina. We find that the deepest and most protracted downturn in U.S. history had limited effects on sons’ intergenerational mobility but reduced daughters’ intergenerational mobility.

Thirteen institutions left the Southern Conference to form the Southeastern Conference during 1932. Why did these schools leave the Southern Conference? Previous historical research portrays the large size of the Southern Conference and the desire to pass academic reforms as reasons for the Southeastern Conference's formation. This article argues that the university presidents and other administrators at Southeastern Conference institutions formed it to enhance the legitimacy of their member institutions. Throughout the Great Depression, the conference's administrators pursued increased legitimacy by attempting to reform academic eligibility rules, allowing football games to be broadcast over the radio, awarding athletic scholarships, allowing member institutions to compete in emerging postseason football bowl games, and hiring a commissioner. This instance of conference realignment is historically significant because some of the policies implemented by the Southeastern Conference contributed to its rise as one of the top revenue-generating conferences in college athletics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Depression was characterized by widespread fiscal policy mistakes in the form of a contractionary or insufficiently expansionary fiscal stance. Despite this general conclusion, there were large differences in the conduct of fiscal policy between countries. I find that a higher degree of fiscal capacity helped countries run less procyclical fiscal policies by allowing them to borrow more extensively. Lower borrowing costs only partially explain this finding. Taken together, the results indicate that interwar governments were constrained in their policies by past investments in fiscal capacity, and not just by Gold Standard membership, ideology, and inadequate knowledge, as commonly held in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkstroi was a Soviet trust that, in partnership with Turkey's state-owned Sümerbank, constructed several industrial enterprises in the Turkish Republic in the 1930s. By situating the trust in the context of Soviet, Turkish, and multilateral economic development, this article argues that the trust was an expression of patterns of both convergence and divergence in Soviet and Turkish interwar statism. As one of the few transnational industrial enterprises to materialize during the first two Soviet Five-Year Plans, Turkstroi was an impressive feat. But the volume of industrial plant and expertise that the trust was able to send to Turkey was largely predetermined by the dynamics of Soviet hard-currency restraints, and the trust's managerial staff was later annihilated during the Stalinist Purges. Still, Turkstroi necessitated the formulation of a transnational wing to the Soviet planned economy and showcased Soviet technical expertise outside the union. In comparison with their respective trading links with Western industrial powers, Soviet-Turkish industrial collaboration was of limited in scope. Nonetheless, to a degree disproportionate with its actual economic contribution, Turkstroi generated intellectual debate within Turkey about the character of Turkish development, Soviet boasts about the international dimensions of its industrial prowess, and a host of new Turkish state-owned and bilateral (Ankara-Moscow) institutions to ensure the running of the trust's subsidiary operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Depression and Dust Bowl of the 1930s caused great hardship for many Canadian farmers, especially in the Prairie Provinces. In response to falling prices and crop yields, as well as increasing debt levels, Parliament enacted the Farmers’ Creditors Arrangement Act (FCAA). The mandate of the bold, new statute was to keep farmers on the land by reducing and rescheduling debts to suit the productive value of the farmland and the capacity of the farmer to pay. There is little academic scholarship that examines the FCAA and how it functioned in practice. This article builds on an earlier pilot study of FCAA case files in two Manitoba counties and widens the empirical lens to consider applications from several more Manitoba counties as well as two Ontario counties. It offers the first analysis of how the FCAA operated in Ontario, employing both quantitative and qualitative data to provide a rich commentary, using examples of actual farmers. The analysis reveals that the application of the FCAA was strongly influenced by local, county-level factors. Rather surprisingly, there were few factors that can be attributed to differences between the two provinces more generally, notwithstanding the fact that there are notable variations in farming practices, operations, and conditions in Ontario, a non-prairie province, and Manitoba, a prairie province. A secondary finding is that, in general, the compromises formulated under the FCAA were highly tailored to the individual farmer’s circumstances. However, there were nevertheless pockets of case files where a fairly uniform approach was used to resolve the financial hardship of farmers who were, seemingly, all in quite similar circumstances. Accordingly, the picture that emerges is complex. FCAA practice evinces stark contrasts — generating compromises which could be either bespoke or boilerplate — and limiting the extent to which one can generalize based on the empirical data from individual counties or regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colonial police arrested tens of thousands of Kenyans in the 1930s for minor offenses—a dramatic increase from the 1920s—as the state sought to stabilize profitability for European capital. For the first time in a colony of perennial labor shortages, the Great Depression brought persistent unemployment. This pushed down wages and buttressed capital's flailing profitability. Yet unemployed young African men threatened Kenya's white society, from fears of petty crime and political organizing to delegitimizing imperial propaganda's central claim of "industrious uplift." Seeking to insulate white society from its threats, the state spatially controlled unemployment through arrest of these men in the White Highlands—usually on thin premises—followed by their repatriation to the Native Reserves. To simultaneously preserve the benefits of unemployment to colonial capital, the emergent apparatus kept the unemployed attached to the labor force through labor recruiting, carceral throughput, and fallback position calibration. Thus, low wages and recovering international demand meant that colonial capitalists claimed an increasing share of a growing product. State intervention in Kenya buoyed colonial capitalism through the Depression by further squeezing, harassing, and immiserating workers. This contrast with Depression-era intervention in capitalist core countries frames a distinct reading of the Keynesian turn from the disarticulated colonial periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of the Great Depression in shaping the intergenerational mobility of some of the most upwardly mobile cohorts of the twentieth century. Using newly linked census and vital records from the Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-database, we examine the occupational and educational mobility of more than 265,000 sons and daughters born in Ohio and North Carolina. We find that the deepest and most protracted downturn in U.S. history had limited effects on sons' intergenerational mobility but reduced daughters' intergenerational mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Czech immigrants in America played an important role in the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia after World War I, and even today more than one million Americans claim Czech ancestry. Czech Americans understandably kept a close eye on the young democracy in the centre of Europe during the interwar period. Their reflections are recorded primarily within regional periodicals, which, although being available at least to some extent, are still not sufficiently reflected in the academic literature. Generally, the most researched period is the “peak” of the Czechoslovak immigrant community’s activity in the US around World War I, but there are large gaps elsewhere, especially in the interwar period. The paper attempts to compare the views of Czech immigrants in America on the stock market crash in New York in the autumn of 1929. It focuses specifically on Czech periodicals published in three locations — Chicago, Nebraska, and Texas. The comparison of these three perspectives provides the opportunity to explore the perspective of Czech Americans in urban and rural areas in three different states across the United States. It also focuses on periodicals from a period that researchers have so far shown little interest in. Additionally, comparing these three locations allows for an examination of social, religious, demographic, and other differences, as the Czech immigrant community in the US has never been homogeneous, although it is often presented as such. The paper thus aims to provide a fresh perspective on one of the key moments of interwar history through the eyes of the Czech immigrant community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses food prices in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the factors that influence them, and the measures that the government took to guarantee their stability during the period 1926–1945. The article's timeframe coincides with an important phase of the Kingdom's development, marked by efforts to promote the integration and unification between all its regions by fostering regulatory, financial, and economic unity within the context of limited financial resources. In doing so, it follows a historical analysis methodology, relying on a variety of source materials, among the most important of which are the local documents kept at the King Abdulaziz Foundation, the Institute of Public Administration, and King Fahad National Library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the major historical significance of the Great Depression, little scholarly research exists that analyzes the state of newspaper advertising during the 1930s, particularly in the hard-hit Dust Bowl states. Using Taylor's six-segment message strategy wheel, this research examined display advertising during one of the most difficult years in the most difficult places: 1934 in the Dust Bowl region of Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. Results show that essential services, such as banks, utilities, and transportation, primarily used the informational/rational strategy to provide reassurance and empathy to consumers. However, nonessential industries, such as cosmetics, expensive home goods, and tobacco, often used the transformational/sensory approach to encourage high-quality experiences through spending. This historical analysis offers a unique opportunity for contemporary advertisers to understand how past advertising strategies during a crisis influence the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The massive rise in US stockholding during the early twentieth century resulted in the deepening of securities markets, the spread of investment banks, and the expansion of publicly held corporations. This paper makes use of a unique panel database of South Dakota bank stockholders from 1910 to 1934 to study bank stockholder growth as well as its effect on bank composition and risk. Overall, the average number of stockholders in a bank rose from 8 to 21 over the period with much of the rise occurring after 1924, but many banks remained highly concentrated. The new stockholders are associated with a subsequent increase in a bank's proportion of loans-to-assets, but no direct effect on bank closure outside of this balance sheet effect. The data thus illustrate the start of a movement towards more diffuse bank stockholding and its potential consequences for the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern financial crises are difficult to explain because they do not always involve bank runs, or the bank runs occur late. For this reason, the first year of the Great Depression, 1930, has remained a puzzle. Industrial production dropped by 20.8 percent despite no nationwide bank run. Using cross-sectional variation in external finance dependence, we demonstrate that banks' decision to not use the discount window and instead cut back lending and invest in safe assets can account for the majority of this decline. In effect, the banks ran on themselves before the crisis became evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Supreme Court has wide discretion to choose the cases it will decide. But how does the Court exercise this discretion? The Supreme Court’s rules explain that it may hear any case “important” enough for it to decide. Unsurprisingly, commentators have criticized this standard as “hopelessly indeterminate” and “intentionally vague.” The Court, however, has said more about how it decides whether to grant review. We need simply to look to its merits opinions. These decisions sometimes offer a brief, informative description of the decision to grant review. These oft-overlooked statements may, in aggregate, be suggestive of trends in the Court’s agenda-setting discretion. This Article presents a text and data analysis of thousands of Supreme Court opinions describing the reason for granting review, collectively illuminating which cases are important enough to merit certiorari. This view into certiorari helps reveal which cases earn the Court’s attention and how the Court’s priorities change over time. This analysis finds, for example, that the Court’s docket shifts in response to large events (e.g., depressions and wars) and to significant political developments (e.g., landmark legislation). And, perhaps more concerning, individual appointments also shape the Court’s docket. The Court should thus better explain its decisions to grant review in the mode of a common law of certiorari. Doing so can improve the interbranch dialogue over judicial reform, offer better information to litigants, and instill greater confidence in our Supreme Court.