Great Depression Jeopardy

This event, on October 29, 1929, saw stock prices collapse and is remembered as the start of the Great Depression.

What is Black Tuesday?

This risky practice, in which investors borrowed heavily to buy stocks with only a small percentage down, magnified losses when prices fell.

What is buying on margin?

This wave of institution closures in the early 1930s wiped out the savings of millions of Americans who had no deposit insurance.

What are bank failures?

This broad measure of a nation's total output and income fell by roughly half in the United States between 1929 and 1933.

What is gross domestic product?

This term describes the severe imbalance between how much America could produce and how much consumers could afford to buy in the late 1920s.

What is overproduction?

This 1930s ecological disaster turned much of the southern Great Plains into a landscape of dust storms and ruined farmland.

What is the Dust Bowl?

This poor farming practice, which stripped native prairie grasses that had held the soil in place, worsened the disaster's severity.

What is overplowing?

This mass migration of displaced farm families, many from Oklahoma, sent hundreds of thousands west in search of work.

What is the Dust Bowl migration?

This nickname was applied broadly to displaced Dust Bowl migrants who headed to California, regardless of their actual home state.

Who are Okies?

This novelist captured the Dust Bowl migration in his 1939 book about the Joad family's journey to California.

Who is John Steinbeck?

This president took office in 1933 promising Americans a New Deal and led the nation through most of the Depression.

Who is Franklin D. Roosevelt?

This term describes the opening stretch of FDR's presidency, during which Congress passed a flurry of emergency relief legislation.

What is the Hundred Days?

This radio address format let FDR speak directly and reassuringly to millions of American families during the crisis.

What is a fireside chat?

This 1935 law created a system of retirement, unemployment, and disability payments still in place today.

What is the Social Security Act?

Declared by FDR just days after his inauguration, this closure of every bank in the country was meant to stop the panic and restore confidence.

What is the Bank Holiday of 1933?

This agency put young unemployed men to work planting trees and building trails in state and national parks.

What is the Civilian Conservation Corps?

This agency insured individual bank deposits so that a bank failure would no longer wipe out ordinary depositors' savings.

What is the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation?

This agency built dams and power plants to bring electricity and flood control to a poor rural region of the South.

What is the Tennessee Valley Authority?

This agency employed millions in public works ranging from roads and bridges to murals and theater productions.

What is the Works Progress Administration?

This agency regulates the stock markets and was created in 1934 to restore investor confidence after the crash.

What is the Securities and Exchange Commission?

This term for a makeshift shantytown of the homeless and unemployed was coined in bitter mockery of the president blamed for the Depression's start.

What is a Hooverville?

This long line of the hungry, waiting for free food at a charity or soup kitchen, became a common sight in Depression-era cities.

What is a breadline?

This term describes people who rode freight trains illegally in search of work across the country during the 1930s.

What are hobos?

This grim nickname was given to an old newspaper used as a blanket by someone sleeping outdoors during the Depression.

What is a "Hoover blanket"?

Unemployment in the United States peaked near this rate in 1933, meaning roughly one in four workers had no job.

What is 25 percent?

This documentary photographer became famous for images like Migrant Mother, which captured Depression-era rural suffering.

Who is Dorothea Lange?

This federal program employed writers, including many who later became famous, to produce state guidebooks and collect oral histories.

What is the Federal Writers' Project?

This popular Depression-era pastime, cheap and widely available, let Americans escape their troubles for a few hours in a darkened theater.

What is going to the movies?

This board game, first mass-marketed by Parker Brothers in 1935, let players fantasize about buying real estate and getting rich during hard times.

What is Monopoly?

This singer and folk musician, known as the Dust Bowl troubadour, wrote "This Land Is Your Land" and chronicled migrant hardship in song.

Who is Woody Guthrie?