Depression History

For four consecutive years Shirley Temple was the world’s box-office champion, a record never equaled. By early 1935 her mail was reported as four thousand letters a week, and hers was the second-most popular girl’s name in the country. What distinguished Shirley Temple from every other Hollywood star of the period - and everyone since - was how brilliantly she shone.

If you want to discover the captivating history of the United States of America, then pay attention....

Financial crises happen time and again in post-industrial economies - and they are extraordinarily damaging. Building on insights gleaned from many years of work in the banking industry and drawing on a vast trove of data, Richard Vague argues that such crises follow a pattern that makes them both predictable and avoidable. A Brief History of Doom examines a series of major crises over the past 200 years in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Japan, and China - including the Great Depression and the economic meltdown of 2008.

ALA notable author Iain Lawrence pens a moving tale with a Dickensian atmosphere about a young man's life aboard a cruel 19th-century prison ship. 14-year-old Tom Tin is forced to scavenge on the grimy streets of London after his father is sent to debtor's prison. Tom's survival is threatened by the sinister lowlifes that inhabit his hopeless world. But when he is unjustly arrested for murder, he finds a place that is even worse than the dark city streets.

Drawing on seven years of his own research and the work of other esteemed Lincoln scholars, Shenk reveals how the sixteenth president harnessed his depression to fuel his astonishing success. Lincoln found the solace and tactics he needed to deal with the nation’s worst crisis in the “coping...

In this “thrilling, heartbreaking” (Annie Lyons, author of The Air Raid Club) debut novel set during the Great Depression in 1930s New York, a daring dancer must take her twin brother’s place as a riveter high atop the in-progress Empire State Building to save her family from ruin...

Christopher Knowlton, author of Cattle Kingdom and former Fortune writer, takes an in-depth look at the spectacular Florida land boom of the 1920s and shows how it led directly to the Great Depression. The 1920s in Florida was a time of incredible excess, immense wealth, and precipitous collapse...

Despite my best intentions, I was beginning to understand how my dad saw the world. The shadows haunting every living thing. The secrets inside the lies wrapped in bullshit. Even Gracie’s box of pills was beginning to make sense. For the past five years, Hayley Kincain and her father, Andy, have been on the road, trying to outrun the memories that haunt them both. They moved back to Andy’s hometown to try a “normal” life, but the horrors he saw in the war threaten to destroy their lives.

The untold story of how one woman's life was changed forever in a matter of seconds by a horrific trauma. Barbara Leaming's extraordinary and deeply sensitive biography is the first book to document Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' brutal, lonely and valiant thirty-one year struggle with...

A bold, expert, and actionable map for the re-invention of America’s broken mental health care system As director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Thomas Insel was giving a presentation when the father of a boy with schizophrenia yelled from the back of the room, “Our house is...

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning classic about the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, and how it shaped the nation while steering it through the Great Depression and the outset of World War II. With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin...

The “extraordinary” (New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice) story of FDR’s fight for the soul of American capitalism—from award-winning journalist Diana B. Henriques, author of The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust “I thought I was well versed in the New...

From Pulitzer Prize finalist John Fabian Witt comes the captivating secret history of an epic experiment to remake American democracy. Before the dark money of the Koch Brothers, before the billions of the Ford Foundation, there was the Garland Fund. In 1922, a young idealist named Charles...

Want the true facts of the '20s, '30s, and '40s? This is not just a book by historians, but by real people who lived in the best of times, the worst of times, and the most tragic times. I assigned my students to interview people who lived through the Great Depression and World War II, and the stories were so incredible, intoxicating, and captivating that I promised them I would write the best US history book using their great grandparents, relatives, and neighbors who lived during those crucial periods of United States history.

An urgent, historically-grounded take on the four major factors that undermine American democracy, and what we can do to address them. While many Americans despair of the current state of U.S. politics, most assume that our system of government and democracy itself are invulnerable to decay. Yet...

In the best-selling tradition of The Devil in the White City, award-winning author Brian Hicks tells the explosive story of the Morro Castle, the elegant luxury liner that burned off the coast of New Jersey on September 7, 1934. The captain died under mysterious circumstances seven hours before his ship caught fire off the New Jersey coast.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman shows how today's crisis parallels the events that caused the Great Depression - and explains what it will take to avoid catastrophe. In 1999, Paul surveyed the economic crisis that had swept across Asia and Latin America, and warned that those crises...

An exquisite new collection of short stories from award-winning author Simon Van Booy. Over the past decade, Simon Van Booy has been listening to people’s stories. With these personal accounts as a starting point, he has crafted a powerful collection of short fiction that takes readers into...

“Cody Johnson beautifully balances historical knowledge with cutting-edge science to produce a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening read which paints a holistic picture of the risks and benefits of psychedelic use in modern day medicine and culture.” —Rick Doblin, PhD, Founder and...

A fascinating, “rich, and generous” (Financial Times) look at the treatment of depression by an award-winning science writer that blends popular science, narrative history, and memoir. Is depression a persistent low mood, or is it a range of symptoms? Can it be expressed through a single...