External reading
About this resource
- Publisher
- Federal Reserve History
- Use
- Institutional historical overview of the Great Depression with references to competing causal interpretations.
- Version
- Current historical essay verified August 7, 2026
- Relevant parts
- The contraction from 1929; banking panics; monetary contraction; recovery and research debates
- Link checked
- Aug 7, 2026
The essay supports chronology and an introduction to the interaction among output contraction, unemployment, banking panics, deflation, and monetary conditions. It also exposes disagreement about causal weight rather than presenting one mechanism as the entire explanation.
The module will use the episode to ask learners to distinguish observations, institutional actions, proposed mechanisms, and later interpretation. It will not use the event as a one-to-one template for another recession.