As you plant your wheat for next year, you are hopeful that with just a few good crops you will be able to pay back your loan on the tractor and become more financially stable. This is going to be the year, you can just feel it.

Going into town one morning in early November, however, you hear from your friend that the stock market in New York “crashed” a week earlier on October 29th. You don’t know what all that means but you do hear that it is causing money shortages on the east coast. You hope that it won’t affect you since you are so far away from it.

On October 29 1929, the day that came to be known as Black Tuesday, a combination of low wages, proliferation of debt, weak agriculture and an excess of loans that could not be liquidated caused the trading of 16,410,030 shares on the New York stock exchange, in a single day, to declare the beginning of the great depression.