depressions

An assessment of the political and physical dangers faced by the newly elected President Roosevelt in 1933 profiles such adversaries as would-be assassin Giuseppe Zangara and populist demagogues Huey Long and Charles Coughlin.

During the harshest year (1933) of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's right-hand-man, Harry Hopkins, hired newspaperwoman Lorena Hickok to embark with her close friend, FDR's wife, Eleanor, on a journey to the hardest-hit areas of the country to report back to the president the degree of devastation Americans were coping with. Hickok's contribution to the policies of the New Deal were pivotal and her ill-fated relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt began to unravel after the trip.

Ten-year-old Beans Curry, a member of the Keepsies, the best marble playing gang in Depression-era Key West, Florida, engages in various schemes to earn money while "New Dealers" from Washington, D.C., arrive to turn run down Key West into a tourist resort.

A young girl enlists the help of her friends to solve a robbery in her home that threatens to put her family's house into foreclosure, after her father leaves town to look for work and her mother takes in borders to make ends meet.

A boy recounts his annual summer trips to rural Illinois with his sister during the Great Depression to visit their larger-than-life grandmother.

The Joads abandon their dust-bowl family farm in Oklahoma during the Depression and migrate to the Promised Land of California, only to discover that the promises are empty.

Examines significant events in the history of the U.S., focusing on the Great Depression and the New Deal, with discussion of the causes of the stock market crash, President Franklin Roosevelt's response to the crisis, and the Social Security Act.

Examines the causes and devastating effects of World War I, looks at the reasons why the U.S. became involved in the conflict, discusses life during the Roaring Twenties and the development of jazz music, and explains the intended purpose of Prohibition and its role in the rise of organized crime.