The Impact of the Great Depression
The stock market crash of 1929 sent the nation spiraling into a state of economic paralysis that became known as the Great Depression. As industries shrank and businesses collapsed or cut back, up to 25% of Americans were left unemployed. At the same time, the financial crisis destroyed the life savings of countless Americans (Modern American Poetry). Food, housing and other consumable goods were in short supply for most people (Zinn 282). This widespread state of poverty had serious social repercussions for the country.
America’s agricultural economy had already been suffering for a decade when nature conspired against the country to exacerbate the Great Depression. From 1931 through 1939, severe winds tore through the Dust Bowl – the region composed of the western parts of Kansas and Oklahoma, parts of New Mexico and Colorado, and the Texas panhandle. These winds stirred up the dust of a landscape already devastated by draught and continuous, exhaustive farming practices. These dust storms threatened people’s health and destroyed whole crops (MAP). Impoverished tenant farmers found themselves unable to keep their farms and were forced off their land. This affected everyone in the region, not just the farmers (MAP). Like in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, countless immigrants, broadly nicknamed and despised as “Okies,” flocked to California where they expected to find an abundance of jobs. They flooded the already saturated agricultural labor market, driving wages down as they competed for the few jobs available (Wikipedia). Thus the Dust Bowl migration magnified the problems of the Great Depression and placed a great deal of stress on California’s already troubled econ...
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...eas of American life, however, were not so easily healed; the Great Depression and its various social repercussions had forever changed society and the lives of countless Americans.
Works Cited
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. Teaching Edition. New York: The New Press, 1997.
“Great Depression in the United States.” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2004. http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761584403/Great_Depression_in_the_United_States.html, 1997-2004.
“Great Depression.” Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ depression, 2004.
Nelson, Cary. “The Great Depression.” An Online Journal and Multimedia Companion to Anthology of Modern American Poetry. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/ depression/depression.htm. Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002.
McCraw, David, and Stephen Gikow. “The End to a Unspoken Bargain? National Security and Leaks in a Post-Pentagon Papers World.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 48.2 (2013): 473-509. Academic OneFile. Web. 5 Dec. 2013.
...t Bowl. Unfortunately the circumstances in the Great Plains all came to a head resulting in a horrific ten years for citizens of the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl caused government and people to look at farming practices and to evaluate their output. These policies resulted in overproduction of crops causing the prices to fall. The conclusion of World War I and countries that stopped importing foods added to the pain the farmers were already feeling. Yet with the establishment of government policies such as the Federal Relief Administration and the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act and with drought coming to an end, the Dust Bowl came to an end. The American people knew that they needed to do everything that was possible to end the Dust Bow. Tom Joad, the lead character in The Grapes Wrath best sums it up “ I know this... a man got to do what he got to do.”
Zinn, H. (1980). A people's history of the united states. (2003 ed.). New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Farming was the major growing production in the United States in the 1930's. Panhandle farming attached many people because it attracted many people searching for work. The best crop that was prospering around the country was wheat. The world needed it and the United States could supply it easily because of rich mineral soil. In the beginning of the 1930's it was dry but most farmers made a wheat crop. In 1931 everyone started farming wheat. The wheat crop forced the price down from sixty-eight cents/ bushels in July 1930 to twenty-five cents/ bushels July 1931. Many farmers went broke and others abandoned their fields. As the storms approached the farmers were getting ready. Farmers increased their milking cowherds. The cream from the cows was sold to make milk and the skim milk was fed to the chickens and pigs. When normal feed crops failed, thistles were harvested, and when thistles failed, hardy souls dug up soap weed, which was chopped in a feed mill or by hand and fed to the stock. This was a backbreaking, disheartening chore, which would have broken weaker people. But to the credit of the residents of the Dust Bowl, they shouldered their task and carried on. The people of the region made it because they knew how to take the everyday practical things, which had been used for years and adapt them to meet the crisis.
Edward Snowden, former CIA employee and contractor for the NSA, revealed last year the secret NSA surveillance programs that were used to monitor the United States and foreign countries for terrorists. In May 2013, he met with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and disclosed countless NSA files, that were then published. The files contained information on several secret surveillance programs, as well as other not yet published files. Snowden has fled to other countries for asylum, since the United States government has charged him with espionage and theft of government property. A charge that was expected, as he he predicted that they would "say I have broken the Espionage Act and helped our enemies, but that can be used against anyone who points out how ma...
LEE, J. (2014, March 20). TED2014: NSA responds to Edward Snowden's video talk . .
Keck, Zachary. "Yes, Edward Snowden Is a Traitor." The Diplomat. N.p., 21 Dec. 2013. Web. 21 Feb. 2014
In May of 2013 Edward Snowden who was then working at a National Security Agency office in Oahu, Hawaii began copying top secret documents that belonged to the American government as he believed the documentation contained unethical and immoral content that he believed the American people and the world in general needed to know about. (Snowden, 2014) The documentation that he collated contained information regarding projects such as Prism, which is a top secret NSA surveillance program that has the ability to access the data servers of some of America's large...
In June 2013, Edward Snowden revealed an unauthorized disclosure to The Guardian in an interview about a warrantless action of the government, that NSA has been accessing through the world's nine biggest internet companies to collect data works from citizens. The datas are draw and analyze by NSA from citizen's personal informations such as audios, videos, pictures, e-mails, instant messages, documented files, social network activities, and contact informations. In this surveillance plan, there are two secret program. One is to monitor citizens' network activities, and the second is to monitor through citizens' telephone call records. This is the largest monitoring project that had ever happened in the history of America and it really staggered the public.
Edward Snowden, the famous “whistleblower”, shocked the world with his revelations about the NSA’s database and the programs which allow the organization to access personal information not only of citizens of other nations, but also of citizens of the U.S. The most shocking revelation of all was not the existence of these programs, but the fact that the Obama administration allowed those programs to exist in direct violation of every U.S. citizen’s right to privacy.
The controversy surrounding Edward Snowden has been one of the most controversial whistleblowing stories regarding the United States. Snowden is a former technical contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, therefore he had access to a numerous amount of classified information. Working primarily with Glenn Greenwald, Snowden sent various government documents containing classified information. The top secret information that was leaked involved several ongoing mass surveillance programs of the United States government. These leaked documents exposed plans to seize and record all US and European telephone metadata as well as information from internet surveillance programs such as PRISM and Tempora. Consequently, this situation provoked many ethical dilemmas to surface. In this memo I will argue whether Edward Snowden
Zinn, Howard. A Peoples History of the United States. New York: HaperCollins Publisher Inc., 1999. 25-33.
Today’s shunned people are a new breed. With the internet, information spreads like a wildfire, creating scandals over night and created a person into an outcast. One of the most prevailing examples of this kind of person is Edward Snowden. Snowden worked for the U.S government for many years in both the CIA and the NSA. While working for the government, he found many things wrong with the way they functioned, but figured that the 2008 election of Barack Obama would create reforms in the government(Greenwald, MacAskill, and Poitras). To Snowden’s dismay, no reform came; in fact, Obama pushed for the same corrupt policies that Snowden hated(Greenwald, MacAskill, and Poitras). In 2013, Snowden felt it was time to released the confidential government documents he had been so concerned over to the internet, for whom he trust to make what need to be public and what needed to stay secret(Greenwald, MacAskill, and Poitras). His motives for doing so seemed harmless enough. When asked why he released the documents, he said “There are all so...
Edward Snowden. This is a name that will be in the history books for ages. He will be branded a traitor or a whistleblower depending on where you look. Many Americans feel that Edward Snowden is a traitor who sold the United States’ secrets aiming to harm the nation. Others believe that he was simply a citizen of the United States who exercised his right to expose the government for their unconstitutional actions. It is important to not only know the two sides to the argument of friend or foe, but to also know the facts as well. My goal in this paper is to present the facts without bias and to adequately portray the two sides of the argument.
It is commonly assumed that where there are differences between L1 and L2, the learner's L1 will probably interfere with the L2 (negative language transfer), whereas, when L1 and L2 are similar, the L2 will assist the L2 learning (positive language transfer) (Ellis, 1994). Therefore, we tend to believe that most of the errors are account of negative transfer. This is partly true according to many empirical studies of errors which have showed that many errors are common to different linguistic backgrounds. The L1 is, therefore, one of various sources of errors, and there might be other reasons which should be considered (Krashen, 1988).