It was the worst economic depression that the United States had ever seen.

The stock market crashed, thousands of businesses went bankrupt.

The unemployment rate hit 20%.

There were soup lines and an army of homeless scattered throughout the country.

And it was not the Great Depression.

Learn more about the panic of 1893, the forgotten Depression which realigned American politics,

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. History is sort of weird. There are people in events which punctuate history that gather most of the attention.

This usually consists of wars and charismatic leaders or notable inventions.

These events usually are pretty important, but they're not the only events in history. In particular,

economic events are often overlooked because they aren't as dramatic and their

causes can't be as easily understood. For example, the Roman Emperor Diocletian was known for ending the crisis of the third century and for instituting the

Tetraarchy.

However, the thing which probably most impacted the empire was his economic reforms, which were

simply horrible.

He devalued the currency and instituted a ridiculous series of wage and price controls.

Modern history isn't much different.

If you ask most people to name a depression before the Great Depression, they probably couldn't do it.

Yet in the 19th century alone, there were major economic downturns in 1819, 1837, 1857, and 1873, in just the United States.

19th century depressions or recessions

were actually called panics

because they almost always involved a bank panic. This would be where depositors would rush to a bank to withdraw their money before the bank collapsed.

Of course, the irony was that the bank run would often be the cause of the bank collapse, which made the rumors of a bank collapse, usually a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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