Key Terms
A very long and serious drop in the economy when many people lose jobs, businesses close, and prices and production fall.
What is an Economic Depression?
October 29, 1929
What year did the stock market crash?
Mass removal of immigrant
What is deportation?
Settlers who moved West to claim and farm land under laws encouraging private ownership, often farming fragile prairie soil.
Who were homesteaders?
Franklin D. Roosevelt's series of government programs and reforms starting in 1933 designed to provide relief, recovery, and reform during the Great Depression.
What is the New Deal?
Buying or selling stocks hoping to make quick profits from short-term price changes
What is Stock Speculation?
Widespread closures of financial institutions that wiped out savings and reduced lending, deepening the economic collapse.
What are bank failures?
Shantytown communities of homeless people named after the president blamed for the crisis.
What are Hoovervilles?
Thousands of Dust Bowl and Depression-era migrants traveled west to this state seeking farm work and better living conditions.
What is California?
Agencies created to restore trust in banks and regulate the stock market after 1929—one insures deposits, the other oversees securities trading
What are the FDIC and the SEC?
A tax or fee a government charges on goods imported from other countries, making them more expensive.
What is a Tariff?
Excessive buying of stocks on margin and risky short-term trades that inflated prices before the 1929 crash.
What is stock speculation?
DAILY DOUBLE
Millions lost their jobs, leaving many families without steady income.
What is widespread unemployment?
Extended periods of little rain, severe drought, and strong winds across the Plains that turned exposed topsoil into massive dust storms
What are drought and high winds?
Created in 1935 to provide retirement benefits, unemployment insurance, and aid to families with dependent children.
What is the Social Security Administration (SSA)?
Returning people, voluntarily back to their home country
What is Repatriation?
DAILY DOUBLE
This 1930 law raised U.S. import taxes and worsened global trade.
What is the Smoot–Hawley Tariff?
A series of 1930s efforts and policies that pressured or forced many Mexican and Mexican‑American families to leave the U.S., often called by this name.
What is the Mexican Repatriation?
These practices—like deep plowing that removed native grasses and failing to rotate crops—left soil exposed and vulnerable to wind erosion.
What are poor farming practices?
DAILY DOUBLE
A federal project that built dams and power plants to bring electricity, jobs, and flood control to the Tennessee Valley.
What is the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority)?
A government or organization plan that gives money, services, or support to people who need help (like unemployment pay, food aid, or healthcare).
What is a benefit program?
Factories and farms made more goods than people could buy, driving prices down and hurting businesses.
What is overproduction?
The amendment that started Prohibition and the one that ended it, marking a major social and economic shift during the Depression era
What are the 18th Amendment and the 21st Amendment?
A photographer whose images of migrant families and a novel about Dust Bowl migrants by John Steinbeck highlighted the era's hardships
Who is Dorothea Lange and what is The Grapes of Wrath?
FDR's 1937 proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court to obtain favorable rulings for his programs, criticized for threatening judicial independence.
What is the court‑packing plan?