The Effects Of The Great Depression - 4304 Words

Paper 2: The effects of the Great Depression By: Christa Dorvil Paper 2: The effects of the Great Depression By: Christa Dorvil Modern World History Instructed by Dr. Stephanie Laffer Miami International University of Art and Design Abstract Never had the flaws of capitalism been so evident or as devastating as during the decade that followed the outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929. All across the Euro-American heartland of capitalist world, this vaunted economy system seemed to unravel. For the rich it meant contracting stock prices that wiped out paper fortunes almost overnight. On that day that the American stock market initially crashed (October 24, 1929), eleven Wall Street finances committed suicide, some†¦show more content†¦Now in retrospect, the great depression was one of the deepest and prolonged economic downfalls in the 1930s. In the United States however, it soon began after the infamous stock market crash of October 1929, which in fact sent Wall Street into alarm and effected major investors as well business tycoons and other employees. This only deteriorated as businesses would suffer financially and unemployment was at an all the time high. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt came up w ith tactics and strategies to lessen the effects of the damage done, the economy wouldn’t fully overcome until after 1939 as World War II shifted America. For a little over a decade, businesses would go through financial turmoil and people would have to find other ways to bring in revenue. During the late summer of the 1929, the American economy entered into a recession. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a recession is defined as a period of reduced economic activity. Investors had traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. That day in history was formally known as â€Å"Black Tuesday†. Those same shares had ended up being worthless with no monetary value. The investors who bought them with borrowed money, suffered an excessive lost. Consumer reliability was gone as spending was nonexistent which resulted in factories being closed down. The lack of consumerism also impacted

The Book The Banquet - 1450 Words

Introduction What was thought to be dead was seen alive, what seem to be gone was standing here right by your side, we can be lost in stories tricked into thinking that they are nothing more than twisted tales a fantasy but do we really know the truth that lies behind each one. I have told many stories of my own, stories that would haunt you in your sleep with creatures thirsty for your blood and hunger for your meat. Now let me take you on a journey of which I truly hope you will enjoy a journey far away deep into the past, so are you ready? Because the things that awaits you can forever leave you spellbound. Played by the mind Wet droplets are falling from the sky, as dark clouds are forming, â€Å"look like there’s going to be a storm†Ã¢â‚¬ ¦show more content†¦My hunger grew intensely as I did not pack any food for what I thought was a short journey regretting my action I continued on. Beatrice and I stopped by a creek for a short rest; we lay together under a tree and l looked up somehow mesmerized by the dark clouds, lost in my own thoughts I fell into a deep slumber. Unaware of the time I woke up dumbstruck as heavy rain shoots down from the sky and gustily wind pushing hard against my face with the sound of thunder crackling all around me. Beatrice and I struggling to get up we hurried to our carriage and quickly took refuge, with our clothes wet and damp we waited for the unforgiving rain to end. With much luck the horrific storm lasted for only a couple more minutes which was a huge relief but had made us fallen behind schedule. We step out of the carriage soaking wet as we hurried to change and quickly continued with no time to spare. Hungry we were Beatrice and I decided that we should stop by an inn hoping to find some food though we have been riding for so long that we don’t know for sure if we were travelling in the right direction relying on my experience we went on. Beatrice than asked me â€Å"sweetie are you sure this is the right way we been travelling for so long, the feast starts tomorrow evening and we need to be there by tonight† , I replied â€Å" I’m pretty sure this is the way don’t give your hopes up we’ll make it there in time†. I looked at Beatrice and seeing how

Dark Ages in Europe free essay sample

Dark Ages is the term that was formerly used to describe the decline of Roman culture and the turmoil in Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Modern historians avoid the term with its implication that only Roman values were civilised values. Many Germanic peoples traveled through Italy, Germany, France, Spain and North Africa, settling wherever they could. Many groups formed their own kingdoms. The label employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the darkness of the period with earlier and later periods of light. Originally, the term characterized the bulk of the Middle Ages (ca. 5th 15th C. ) as a period of intellectual darkness between the extinguishing of the light of Rome and the Renaissance or rebirth from the 14th century onwards. This definition is still found in popular usage, but increased recognition of the accomplishments of the Middle Ages since the 19th century has led to the label being restricted in application. Since the 20th century, it is frequently applied only to the earlier part of the era, the Early Middle Ages (ca. 5th 9th C. ). However, many modern scholars who study the era tend to avoid the term altogether for its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate for any part of the Middle Ages. The concept of a Dark Age originated with the Italian scholar Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) in the 1330s, and was originally intended as a sweeping criticism of the character of Late Latin literature. Petrarch regarded the post-Roman centuries as dark compared to the light of classical antiquity. Later historians expanded the term to refer to the transitional period between Roman times and the High Middle Ages (ca. 11th 13th C.), including not only the lack of Latin literature, but also a lack of contemporary written history, general demographic decline, limited building activity and material cultural achievements in general. Popular culture has further expanded on the term as a vehicle to depict the Middle Ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and expanding its scope. The idea of a Dark Age originated with Petrarch in the 1330s. Writing of those who had come before him, he said: Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom. Christian writers, including Petrarch himself, had long used traditional metaphors of light versus darkness to describe good versus evil. Petrarch was the first to co-opt the metaphor and give it secular meaning by reversing its application. Classical Antiquity, so long considered the dark age for its lack of Christianity, was now seen by Petrarch as the age of light because of its cultural achievements, while Petrarchs time, allegedly lacking such cultural achievements, was seen as the age of darkness. As an Italian, Petrarch saw the Roman Empire and the classical period as expressions of Italian greatness. He spent much of his time travelling through Europe rediscovering and republishing classic Latin and Greek texts. He wanted to restore the classical Latin language to its former purity. Humanists saw the preceding 900-year period as a time of stagnation. They saw history unfolding, not along the religious outline of Saint Augustines Six Ages of the World, but in cultural (or secular) terms through the progressive developments of classical ideals, literature, and art. During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries, Protestants wrote of the Middle Ages as a period of Catholic corruption. Just as Petrarchs writing was not an attack on Christianity per se -– along with his humanism, he was deeply occupied with the search for God –- neither was this an attack on Christianity: it was a drive to restore what Protestants saw as biblical Christianity. The Magdeburg Centuries was a celebrated work of ecclesiastical history compiled by Lutheran scholars and published between 1559 and 1574. Devoting a volume to each century, it covered the first thirteen centuries of Christianity up to 1298. The work was virulently anti-Catholic. Identifying the Pope as the Antichrist, it painted a dark picture of church history after the fifth century, characterizing it as increments of errors and their corrupting influences In response to the Protestants, Roman Catholics developed a counter-image, depicting the High Middle Ages in particular as a period of social and religious harmony, and not dark at all. The most important Catholic reply to the Magdeburg Centuries was the Annales Ecclesiastici by Cardinal Caesar Baronius. Baronius was a trained historian who kept theology in the background and produced a work that the Encyclop? dia Britannica in 1911 described as far surpassing anything before his day† and that Acton regarded as the greatest history of the Church ever writtenâ€Å". The Annales, covering the first twelve centuries of Christianity up to 1198, was published in twelve volumes between 1588 and 1607. It was in Volume X that Baronius coined the term dark age for the period between the end of the Carolingian Empire in 888 and the first inklings of the Gregorian Reform under Pope Clement II in 1046: The new age (saeculum) which was beginning, for its harshness and barrenness of good could well be called iron, for its baseness and abounding evil leaden, and moreover for its lack of writers (inopia scriptorum) dark (obscurum). Significantly, Baronius termed the age dark because of the paucity of written records capable of throwing light on it for the historian. While some historians, following Baroniuss lead, used dark age neutrally to refer to a dearth of written records, others, in the manner of the early humanists and Protestants (and later the Enlightenment writers and their successors right up to the present day) used it pejoratively, lapsing into that lack of neutrality and objectivity that has quite spoilt the term for many modern historians. The first British historian to use the term was most likely Gilbert Burnet, in the form darker ages, which appears several times in his work in the last quarter of the 17th century. His earliest use of it seems to have been in 1679 in the Epistle Dedicatory to Volume I of The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, where he writes: The design of the reformation was to restore Christianity to what it was at first, and to purge it of those corruptions, with which it was overrun in the later and darker ages. † He uses it again in 1682 in Volume II of the History, where he dismisses the story of St Georges fighting with the dragon as a legend formed in the darker ages to support the humour of chivalryâ€Å". Burnet was a Protestant bishop chronicling how England became Protestant and his use of the term is invariably pejorative During the 17th and 18th centuries, in the Age of Enlightenment, many critical thinkers saw religion as antithetical to reason. For them the Middle Ages, or Age of Faith, was therefore the polar opposite of the Age of Reason. Kant and Voltaire, among others, were vocal in attacking the religiously dominated Middle Ages as a period of social regress, while Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire expressed contempt for the rubbish of the Dark Ages. The earliest entry for a capitalised Dark Ages in the Oxford English Dictionary is a reference in Henry Thomas Buckles History of Civilization in England in 1857. Starting and ending dates varied: the Dark Ages were considered by some to start in 410, by others in 476 when there was no longer an emperor in Rome, and to end about 800, at the time of the Carolingian Renaissance under Charlemagne, or to extend through the rest of the 1st millennium. ROMANTICISM In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Romantics reversed the negative assessment of Enlightenment critics and launched a vogue for medievalism. The word Gothic had been a term of opprobrium akin to Vandal until a few self-confident mid-18th-century English Goths like Horace Walpole initiated the Gothic Revival in the arts. This sparked off an interest in the Middle Ages, which for the following Romantic generation began to take on an idyllic image of the Age of Faith. This image, in reaction to a world dominated by Enlightenment rationalism in which reason trumped emotion, expressed a romantic view of a Golden Age of chivalry. Middle Ages were seen with romantic nostalgia as a period of social and environmental harmony and spiritual inspiration, in contrast to the excesses of the French Revolution and, most of all, to the environmental and social upheavals and sterile utilitarianism of the emerging industrial revolution. When the term Dark Ages is used by historians today, therefore, it is intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem dark to us because of the paucity of historical records compared with both earlier and later times. However, from the mid-20th century onwards, other historians became critical of even this nonjudgmental use of the term for two main reasons. First, it is questionable whether it is possible to use the term Dark Ages effectively in a neutral way; scholars may intend this, but it does not mean that ordinary readers will so understand it. Second, the explosion of new knowledge and insight into the history and culture of the Early Middle Ages, which 20th-century scholarship has achieved,[means that these centuries are no longer dark even in the sense of unknown to us. To avoid the value judgment implied by the expression, many historians avoid it altogether.

The Euro Plight

A single currency for the countries in the Eurozone was an idea that was brought up with the hope that this would steer economic development and eliminate trading barriers within this block. This has however turned to be a hindrance to economic growth within the region instead.Advertising We will write a custom assessment sample on The Euro Plight specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More With the Eurozone economic crisis and deflation that has been witnessed in the countries within the Eurozone, the Euro currency has lost its value against other world currencies. It has for instance been exchanging at around $1.32 against the US Dollar in the resent past as evident in the graph bellow. Various measures have been put in place so as to save the Euro from the loss of value. One of these measures has been the purchasing of assets by the Central Banks of various countries. Performance of the Euro against the US Dollar The bank of Japan for in stance launched a stimulus program where it was supposed to purchase assets with the intention of strengthening the Yen against major world currencies with the Euro included. This came in the wake of the European Central Bank and the U.S. Federal Reserve taking the same measures to strengthen their currencies. The purchasing of government as well as corporate bonds was aimed at strengthening the yen against major world currencies but it did not yield much as expected. Strengthening the yen only helped in reducing oversees corporate earnings. The exporters do not get maximum profits when the currency is so strong against other world currencies and this to some extend slowed down the economic recovery. The same measures that did not work quite effectively for the bank of Japan have been undertaken by the European Central Bank which is a clear indication that the Eurozone Economic Crisis is still far from being resolved. A stronger currency without the creation of jobs and building a p latform for economic development would do little to avert the Eurozone crisis. With all efforts being made to rescue the Euro against depreciating, the currency has remained consolidated for a long time against the major world currencies hence the need to come up with other formulas so as to save this currency. The currency has lost by 0.12% against the sterling pound hence exchanging at 0.8022. It also depreciated against other major currencies like the Swiss franc were it depreciated by 0.19% hence exchanging at 1.2088 Franc per Euro.Advertising Looking for assessment on business economics? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More Performance of the Euro against the Sterling Pound The Bank of Japan had opted for quantitative easing which involves the printing of more currency. This money is then used in the purchasing of bonds as well as other bank assets from banks. This then implies that these banks have more money at their dispo sal to issue as loans, improving their infrastructure and creation of employment by the opening of more branches, increasing their assets which then trickle down to economic growth. This also helps in lowering the interest rates and this is quite critical in economic stimulation. It encourages spending and investment hence economic growth. The aim is basically to counter deflation by reducing interest and creating enough quantity reserve hence raising the price of these assets. The extremely lower interest rates might however make it hard for the banks to sail through inflation. This measure also causes distortion on the government dept particularly given that some government borrowings are usually with extremely low rates and buying such securities and bonds are likely to slow down economic stimulation and any changes on these can have an enormous impact on the economy. Sovereigns are also likely to mismanage their finances as they might not obey market pressures hence putting pres sure on the economy. The European Central Bank had taken up these measures in an effort to alleviate the European Economic Crisis. In spite of all these measures the Euro has not strengthened much against the world major currencies for instance the Japanese Yen where the Euro depreciated by 0.02 to exchange at 102.79 Yen per Euro. Performance of the Euro against the Japanese Yen The Capital Markets have particularly been closed to some countries as well as banks in the zone due to the crisis but the European Central Bank has promised to take some short-term actions in an effort to revive the bonds market. All the measures taken are meant to rescue the Eurozone from the Economic crisis but this is not supposed to act as a quick fix and it will take time before the recovery is fully realized.Advertising We will write a custom assessment sample on The Euro Plight specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More By the end of next year, it is expec ted that the crisis will be over. Investors are however very cautious on the economic situation in the region with countries such as Spain which still need to be bailed out of their debts. This has slowed down the economic development in the region hence slowing down the recovery. The tax laws need to be changed so as to reduce the dept which is having a great effect on the GDP of the countries within the Eurozone. A compromise has to be reached concerning the tax laws as well as the appropriate measures to be taken so us to save the Euro. The issue of creation of employment as well as reducing job loses is quite crucial in averting the crisis even though all the parties concerned have not found a common solution to this particular issue. The road to recovery has been quite sluggish with so many obstacles to be overcome. The Euro currency has particularly consolidated with no major variations in terms of appreciation or depreciation of the Euro. Works Cited Lapavitsas, Costas. Crisi s in the Eurozone. London: Verso Books, 2012. This assessment on The Euro Plight was written and submitted by user Brock Flores to help you with your own studies. You are free to use it for research and reference purposes in order to write your own paper; however, you must cite it accordingly. You can donate your paper here.