1. According to Gary M. Walton and Hugh Rockoff, “The Great Depression was the most important economic event of the twentieth century.” In this essay, you have the opportunity to address two of the most important questions debated by economic historians of the Great Depression: “What caused this unprecedented collapse? Why did the economy remain depressed for so long?” (Walton and Rockoff, Chapter 23, page 422)

2. Walton and Rockoff pose, perhaps, the most important set of questions facing economic historians of the 1920s: “A central question faced by economic historians is whether the disasters of the 1930s were the inevitable outcome of the prosperity of the 1920s and its reliance on a free market economy, or whether they were the result of shocks and policy mistakes in the 1930s. Was there, to put it somewhat dramatically, a fatal cancer growing in the economy of the 1920s that brought disaster ever closer, even as the economic physicians of the day continued to pronounce the patient in good health?” (Walton and Rockoff, Chapter 22, page 394). What do you think?