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In an era saturated with images of suffering, especially the suffering of children, the voice of the impoverished child in modernist fiction of the Great Depression demands a different type of response as the reader experiences an experimental modernism that is, at once, as political and complicated as highly sentimental images. The fictional construction of the poor child's voice does major cultural work that has been long ignored in studies of the 1930s, cultural work that expands discussions of poverty and teaches us how to listen to what we might otherwise reject. The astonishingly complex voices that the poor child in these representations is pressed into, the choices made and claims asserted--that may seem bizarre and ill-fitting and outrageous--are in fact the artistic and political triumph of these texts, an artistic triumph that functions as an ethical understanding and elicits a moral engagement in which we as readers learn to listen to a kind of self-presentation that is entirely of its own making, that asks us to respond and to comprehend. Literature from the 1930s written about children depicts the other that is actually other, disoriented and confusing and odd. After all, it is tenable if the poor child should choose silence or bitterness; yet instead, this literature gives voice to the poor child, voice that sensitively displays great ingenuity and practicality. The anti-language of this vulnerable other, as demonstrated in the work of Faulkner, Caldwell, Olsen, and Wright prompts the reader to see overlapping registers not as chaotic or nonsensical but as the child's efforts to shape order from clutter and to engage others in the problems of their world, a world marked by loss and damage. Thus, by unpacking the disorder within the language of the poor child, the limit case for depravity, the reader undertakes an empathetic engagement that, because it sees the child as other, attempts to imagine the child's interiority. The child in poverty models for the reader a way to see the world anew, a call for an ethical understanding that brings forth imaginative proposals to problems devastatingly simple--a lack of basic needs--yet made complex not only by the magnitude of those suffering and the systems that propagate such suffering, but the fact that the one suffering is a child. In other words, the anti-language of the poor child teaches us how to read ethically while other cultural voices for the child in poverty, because they erase the "potential disorder" within language, make invisible the interior complexity of the poor child. If taught how to listen to that which we might otherwise reject, the anti-language of the poor child--articulated or silent, stream-of-consciousness or formally narrated, fictional or epistolary--demands a response. Poverty, after all, is deeply embedded within our denials and America, quite frankly, does not know what to do with the poor. A call toward an ethical understanding that elicits our engagement is to claim voice for a poor child, to move her from the margins to the center where we are made aware and can begin the arduous work of unpacking the complicated dialectic of her language.

This paper examines banks in Missouri during the Great Depression in order to find the correct model specification for bank failure during economic downturns. The data set controls for a bank’s balance sheet, correspondent network, charters and memberships, county characteristics, and market share, and includes both Federal Reserve member and non-member banks. Using a probit model, it is concluded that the contractionary monetary policy employed by the St. Louis Federal Reserve did not help bank survival, as being a member of the Federal Reserve had no significant effect on a bank’s probability of survival. Additionally, while an increased network led to higher rates of bank survival, connections to Chicago show evidence of contagion risk. Finally, the paper concludes that for future model specification it is important to capture balance sheet, network, and environment characteristics, as leaving out certain information can lead to omitted variable bias.

This thesis concerns banking and financial systems in the United States of America during the time of the Great Depression. In the first stage, I will focus on the Federal Reserve System's monetary policy and its expansive character. Then I will emphasize on the events taking place in American banking system during the 20's, the linkage between these events and the great contradiction of American economy, which took place at the end of the decade. The key part of my thesis will be devoted to the analysis of the most important state interventions, which were supposed to save the banking and financial system from collapsing between 1930 -- 1933, and make the economy prosperous again. I will devote to the steps taken by Hervert Hoover; the president between years 1929 -- 1933, as well as the steps from the first year of F. D. Roosevelt's presidency. F. D. Roosevelt's era started in March 1933, and it was the time when the American banking system found itself in the most critical situation ever. During this era, the crucial measures were taken, and I will examine the hypothesis in which there were close connections between the political and the big business representatives standing behind their enactment. I will attempt to demonstrate that the officially proclaimed goals of those measures were unlike the real content, and the consequences of the new legislatives being enacted during these times.

The Great Recession has brought income inequality to the forefront of the American psyche. Parallels have been made between the Great Depression and the Great Recession, and as such, economic history can act as a powerful analytical tool in directing policy. The first essay in Income Inequality during the Great Depression is a qualitative analysis of income transitions from 1929 to 1933 using 33 representative cities as surveyed by the Civil Works Administration. The second essay investigates the welfare effects of income inequality on infant mortality during the Depression. And the third essay on noninfant mortality gives context to the analysis of infant mortality and stillbirths.

The Works Progress Administration came to New Orleans in 1935, a time of economic uncertainty and even fear. The implementation of the relief embodied in the WPA was influenced by local factors that reinforced the existing social order at first but that left a framework through which that order could be challenged. The business of providing WPA relief also was attended by scandal and criticism. In spite of these inherent weaknesses and certain incident, the WPA left behind an enviable physical legacy that is used and enjoyed today by the citizens of New Orleans. This paper explores the roots of that legacy, some of the obstacles faced by the WPA, and how a local government, and its citizens, related and adjusted to an increasingly powerful and intrusive federal government.

The Stars of David is based on the true story of a woman whose love of baseball stood above all. Set in the midst of the Great Depression, Jackie Austin, disgusted by the chauvinistic expectations of her impoverished father, sets off on her own to play for whatever team that will have her. That team proves to be the barnstorming House of David Baseball Club, an ascetic religious commune struggling to regain past glory after a decade of tragedy and shame. Outsiders and freaks to the rest of the world, these new "Stars" of David must learn to work together on the field in order to prosper in life. Can they succeed in the staunchly traditional, largely racist world of Depression-era Major League Baseball? Or will they, too, be whitewashed by time?

This work aims to explain the performance of the Brazilian economy throughout the period of the Great Depression. We propose a general equilibrium, open economy model in which the Brazilian government can improve the terms of trade by taking advantage of Brazil\'s monopolistic position in international coffee markets. It burns a share of coffee production in order to influence international prices, thus containing the impact of the Great Depression on the domestic economy\'s supply of foreign consumption and investment goods. We find that our coffee burning mechanism is capable of improving the performance of the economy for some of our assumptions about the share of coffee that is destroyed. Our models also fits with different degrees of success the data on international coffee prices. / Este trabalho objetiva explicar a performance da economia brasileira durante o período da Grande Depressão. Nós propomos um modelo de equilíbrio geral com economia aberta no qual o governo brasileiro consegue melhorar os termos de troca ao se aproveitar da posição monopolística do Brasil nos mercados internacionais de café. Ele queima uma parcela da produção de café para influenciar os preços internacionais, assim contendo o impacto da Grande Depressão sobre a oferta de bens de consumo e investimento importados da economia doméstica. Nós descobrimos que o mecanismo de queima do café é capaz de melhorar a performance da economia sob algumas de nossas hipóteses sobre a parcela de café que é destruída. Nossos modelos também se ajustam com diferentes graus de sucesso aos dados sobre os preços internacionais do café.

Tato diplomová práce analyzuje vývoj meziválečné ekonomiky Velké Británie s důrazem na Velkou hospodářskou krizi a zároveň hledá příčiny této krize. Mezi hlavní průvodní jevy této krize patří vysoká míra nezaměstnanosti a kolaps mezinárodního obchodu, na kterém byla Velká Británie životně závislá.