Major Concepts:

1. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 was both the culmination of political, social, and economic forces that had gone out of control in the 1920s and the harbinger of a vast and deep economic slump that would dominate the 1930s.

2. The Great Depression dramatically changed the lives of most Americans and began to change both their understanding of the economic system and the place of government in American life.

Objectives: The student will be able to:

1. Describe the social, political, and economic forces that prevailed in the 1920s and the behavior of the American people attributable to those forces.

2. Produce a graphic display that demonstrates the extent of the economic slump that dominated the 1930s.

3. Formulate a hypothesis as to what changes the Great Depression brought to the lives of most Americans and develop a procedure for testing that hypothesis through the use of oral-history techniques.

4. Use oral-history techniques to explain the Americans' understanding of the economic system, the stock-market crash of 1929, and the Great Depression.

Suggested lesson/activities:

This lesson is the first of a series in which students can become historians using oral accounts of the past given by (a) Americans who lived during the period under study and by (b) their immediate heirs, who have original documents and recollections of their deceased parentsŐ experiences.

The teacher has several options as to which method would best be used to achieve the first objective and provide information other than from interviews necessary to complete the other objectives. If time permits, students can work in small groups or independently to review resources provided by the teacher and the media specialist. The teacher may give the necessary information through a series of handouts or in lectures. Objective 2 requires students to extract specific information from a variety of sources and display it in a different format to demonstrate a trend. The intent here is to test the students' ability to reduce complex information to a more simple and concrete form.

DAY ONE

1. Begin the lesson by projecting headlines from any leading newspaper of national circulation depicting the trouble the economy was in just before, during, and just after the 1929 stock market crash. Also project headlines emphasizing the responses to the problems. (Be sure that the dates of the newspapers are evident.) Ask students to infer what is happening and who is involved as they observe the displayed newspapers.

2. Following the display of headlines, ask the students to imagine that these headlines are appearing today. Ask students to predict what the headlines would lead to in their lives and lives of other people -- such as merchants, industrialists, bankers, government officials, and so forth. Have students compile the list of predictions so that they can make comparisons between their predictions and what happened in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

3. Take the student through an imaginary scenario similar to that occurring in 1929 just before and during the crash. Ask the student to imagine he or she has obtained a steady job at McDonald's. With that income, he or she is able to purchase a used car on credit with no down payment and three years to pay. He or she then goes on to purchase a stereo system for the car -- again on credit, using his or her employment as a basis for securing it. He or she then receives an unsolicited bank credit card with a pre-approved credit line but carrying a 19% interest rate and high penalties for failure to pay on time each month. He or she uses the credit card to the limit before his or her first payment is due. A similar credit card arrives from another bank, and he or she repeats the process.

4. Proceed in this fashion to include banks that extend credit to companies which continues to produce new cars and stereo systems in anticipation of future orders. Banks in turn buy securities issued by those companies, paying only a small percentage down and anticipating a rise in stock prices due to the impression that increased productivity will result in increased earnings. They also buy capitalization bonds of other companies with the perception that they will be easily sold on the open market. Point out, if students do not already recognize it, the volatile nature of this scenario.

5. Now postulate that he or she has lost his or her job and ask the students to trace the ripple effect produced by it throughout the economic system which has been laid out.

   Teacher note: With some creativity, teachers could create a role-playing situation with assigned roles to various players represented in the scenario.

6. Close this lesson with a summary that bridges these activities with the independent study to follow.

DAY TWO

1. Begin by distributing to each student a list of the two content/concept statements for Lesson Three and the four objectives. By this time, students should be familiar with the procedures for securing information independently. They also should have had many opportunities to construct displays for class presentation.

2. 1. Use the remainder of the class period to review the procedures historians use to investigate a problem (steps of historical inquiry), specifically the methods of oral history. Allow students to offer some problems and possible hypotheses to investigate.

   2. End the class period by generating a series of questions that students might ask during their oral-history inquiries.