The Great Depression

Two books by different historians paint a largely similar picture of the Great Depression of the 1930s, but have quite different attitudes about this period. The Age of Extremes, The Short Twentieth Century 1914 - 1991, written by Eric Hobsbawm, who experienced the depression first hand, exaggerates somewhat the social suffering of this period. Whereas Britain in the Depression: Society and Politics 1929 - 1939 was written by two much younger historians, John Stevenson and Chris Cook, whose lives were not directly affected by the depression and can examine the period without bias, but the…