Ap World History-Harman vs. Textbook: Great Depression

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AP World History February 15, 2013 The Global Great Depression Chris Harman, the hailed author with outspoken views on Marxist ideas and staunch advocate for people’s rights, and Jerry H. Bentley with Herbert F. Ziegler, the authors of Traditions and Encounters, a standard AP World History textbook, are radically different people with differing opinions and ideas relating to world history. Harman takes an approach that’s more “off the beaten path” while Bentley and Ziegler work literally “by the book” with a more fact-based perspective on history. However, at times their work will coincide and have similarities, for example, in the topic of the Great Depression. More specifically, when analyzing the behaviors and events before, during, and after the global Depression, Harman and the two authors manage to agree when it comes to the degree of despair which people were living in and disagree on specifics about causes of the Depression. Among both sources, the conditions under which people lived during the Great Depression can be described as “the end of an era for those who had come to believe in ‘money for nothing’” (Harman 469) and “so long-lasting, so severe, and so global that it has become known as the Great Depression” (Bentley-Ziegler 985). It’s true that the world was in turmoil. People of all ages and of all social classes were panicking, some believing the times impossible to bear. For some, this was true. The Stock Market Crash, which coincided with the Great Depression, allowed for further suffering, especially great financial toil. Bentley and Ziegler sum up the accounts of misery well, stating that the “stark, gloomy statistics…do not convey the anguish and despair of those who lost their jobs, savings, homes, and often their dignity and hope” (Bentley-Ziegler 988). Similarly, Harman adds, “The slump tore apart the lives of those who had been

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