1929–late 1930s CE · uneven global depression and recovery · Global · Trade
Banking crises, debt, deflation, the gold standard and collapsing demand and trade transmitted a deep depression through an unequal world economy.
Atlas dossier · World WarsFree device narration · synchronized English captions · transcript available
Why it matters
The Wall Street crash is a visible 1929 marker, but banking panics, debt, falling demand, policy mistakes and the international gold standard helped deepen and transmit depression. No single market day explains the duration or varied national experience.
Federal Reserve History: Great Depression ↗Falling commodity prices and trade affected agricultural producers and colonial economies as well as industrial workers and banks. Race, gender, citizenship and relief rules shaped who received help. U.S. New Deal records are important evidence, but they cannot stand in for every country’s response.
U.S. National Archives: New Deal records ↗Monetary change, public spending, rearmament and wartime mobilisation affected recovery differently across countries. Political extremism grew in some settings but was not an automatic product of unemployment. The late-1930s endpoint is a teaching boundary, not proof that all economies or households had recovered by 1939.
Academic research on the global Great Depression ↗Silent pan-and-zoom motion derivative of the Great Depression reconstruction; not archival footage.
Primary Atlas editorial reconstruction for Great Depression.
World History in Pictures · Public site artwork. This record does not grant third-party republication rights.
How Atlas classifies this artwork →
Supporting Atlas reconstruction within the same Great Depression editorial package; not an independent archival record.
World History in Pictures · Same editorial artwork package
How Atlas classifies this artwork →
Context crop from the same Great Depression reconstruction; not an independent historical record.
World History in Pictures · Same editorial artwork package
How Atlas classifies this artwork →Interpretation note
This dossier distinguishes the event’s basic chronology from later arguments about meaning, responsibility and legacy. When comparing religious, national, Indigenous or scholarly interpretations, consult the primary and institutional sources above alongside peer-reviewed historical work.
Elsewhere in the world
1928–1945 CE · observation, clinical development and mass production · EuropePenicillin and antibioticsFleming observed penicillin’s antibacterial effect in 1928; Florey, Chain, Heatley and a wider Oxford team later developed purification and testing, while British and U.S. institutions scaled production during the war.
1931–1945 CE · Manchurian seizure, war in China and wider Pacific conflict · AsiaThe Asia-Pacific War and NanjingJapan seized Manchuria in 1931; full-scale war with China followed in 1937 and merged with the wider Pacific war after 1941. In late 1937 and early 1938, Japanese forces perpetrated mass killing, sexual violence, looting and terror against civilians and disarmed soldiers in Nanjing.
1938–1945 CE · experimental fission, interpretation, chain reaction and atomic war · EuropeNuclear fission and the nuclear ageHahn and Strassmann’s 1938 experiments produced evidence of uranium fission; Meitner and Frisch supplied the physical interpretation and name. Chain-reaction research then led rapidly to a reactor and the Manhattan Project.