History Fact of the Day, 1/29/10

Surprisingly, many students of the 1929 American stock market crash cannot apply a cause-and-effect linkage between the Crash and the following Great Depression.

Even when the market seriously fumbled in the fall of 1929, many saw it as a possibly positive event. John Maynard Keynes noted that Black Thursday was a promising mishap to hopefully cleanse the system from speculative to productive uses. Herbert Hoover said in the autumn of 1929, "The fundamental business of the country, that is, production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis."

In 1930 the New York Times cited the biggest event in 1929 was Admiral Byrd's expedition to the South Pole.

The Great Depression did not fully devastate the country until a few years after the Black Thursday; after all, less than 2.5% of the population owned stocks at the time.

source: David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear

History Fact of the Day, 1/10/10

Before the Civil War, Stonewall Jackson taught mathematics at Virginia Military Institute. Though celebrated in the war, at VMI Jackson was greatly disliked by his students. At one supposed incident, a couple of angry VMI students attempted to kill Jackson by dropping a brick on his head from the top of a building. The brick hit Jackson's hat, sparing him

To me Jackson looks older than his late thirties, which is when he died. This photo was taken a few days before Chancellorsville.