Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that

shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell.

Guys, I am very excited about today's episode. It is honestly a topic that I've had my eye on for a while,

but because it's such a sprawling and complex subject, I'd been a little nervous to really

dive in and tackle it, but now seems like the right time. Over the next few episodes,

we will be examining one of the most notorious events in American history, arguably world history. During the course of one week,

in October of 1929, 30 billion dollars of wealth vanished into thin air. What began as a tremor

of panic in downtown New York mutated into a financial shockwave that rippled across the entire

United States and out into the wider world.

This event destabilized the world economy. It impoverished entire generations, and it marked the

beginning of the long, collective trauma we now call the Great Depression. One historian called

this event, quote, the most climactic financial disaster in history. Another called it,

quote, the worst economic collapse in the history of the modern industrial world. Another

said that, quote, few man-made events, short of the world wars, created so much pain and

bitterness and the fear that it would occur again. I am referring, of course, to the stock market crash of 1929.

Sometimes it's called the Great Crash or the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

It's a story that most of us are vaguely aware of, at least on a surface level, when we hear

phrases like Wall Street and Crash in 1920s, we tend to picture guys who

look like the Monopoly Man leaping to their deaths from the top of tall buildings.

Men who in their ravenous greed lost it all on the stock market and faced with the petty

humiliations of poverty chose to end their lives, men who would rather die than be poor. That mental image, however,

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