The Great Depression: Hard Times in America

About The Great Depression: Hard Times in America

Give your memory a workout with The Great Depression: Hard Times in America: 15 multiple-choice questions aimed at mixed difficulty, free to play right in your browser. From Black Tuesday to the New Deal — revisit a decade that tested the nation's resilience and reshaped modern government for generations to come. Expect to spend about 7 minutes; every question comes with an explanation, so you learn something even when you miss.

A few sample questions

1. 1. The catastrophic stock market crash that launched the Great Depression is known as "Black Tuesday." On what date did it occur?

   Answer: October 29, 1929

   October 29, 1929 is remembered as Black Tuesday, when the New York Stock Exchange collapsed and the market lost roughly $14 billion in a single day — the opening blow of the worst economic crisis in American history.

2. 2. At the very worst point of the Great Depression, approximately what share of American workers were unemployed?

   Answer: About 25 percent

   Unemployment peaked at roughly 25 percent in 1933, meaning one in four American workers had no job — the highest unemployment rate in United States history, before or since.

3. 3. During the Depression, homeless Americans built crude communities of tents and scrap-wood shelters in cities across the country. What were these makeshift settlements called?

   Answer: Hoovervilles

   These desperate communities were sarcastically nicknamed "Hoovervilles" after President Herbert Hoover, whom many Americans blamed for doing too little to ease the suffering of ordinary families during the Depression's darkest years.

4. 4. The "Dust Bowl" of the 1930s was caused by a severe drought combined with years of over-plowing that stripped the protective topsoil away. Which region was at the very heart of the Dust Bowl?

   Answer: The southern Great Plains — Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Texas panhandle

   The southern Great Plains — especially Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Texas panhandle — suffered the worst dust storms because farmers had plowed under the native grasses that naturally held the soil in place, leaving it exposed to the relentless prairie wind.

5. 5. Bank runs and financial panic triggered a catastrophic wave of bank closures during the Depression. Roughly how many U.S. banks failed between 1929 and 1933?

   Answer: More than 9,000

   More than 9,000 American banks failed during the Depression, wiping out the lifetime savings of millions of families who had no deposit insurance — one of the key reasons the FDIC was created as part of the New Deal.

Things you'll learn along the way

• ✓About three million young men served in the CCC between 1933 and 1942, planting more than three billion trees and building hundreds of trails, cabins, and facilities in state and national parks that Americans still enjoy today.
• ✓The WPA's Federal Art Project, Federal Writers' Project, and Federal Theatre Project employed thousands of creative Americans, producing public murals, state guidebooks, dramatic plays, and recorded oral histories that remain treasures of American culture.
• ✓The Social Security Act of 1935 created the foundation of America's social safety net, establishing retirement benefits for workers over 65 and a system of unemployment insurance — both radical new ideas that were fiercely debated at the time.