Born Then1929–1939
Life during the Great Depression
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
After the 1929 crash, world trade shrank by about two-thirds and unemployment reached a quarter of workers in the United States and Germany. Farmers everywhere saw crop prices collapse; the slump fed the rise of extremist politics.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from our model, estimated from the sources.
Around the same time
- British emigration to the colonies and America 1815–1913
- Indian indenture system 1834–1917
- Chinese emigration from Guangdong and Fujian 1845–1913
- Irish emigration after the Famine 1852–1913
- Third plague pandemic 1855–1930
- Polish emigration "za chlebem" 1870–1913
- Reforms of King Chulalongkorn 1874–1910
- Great Italian emigration 1880–1913
- Sixth cholera pandemic 1899–1923
- Korea under Japanese rule 1910–1945
- Mexican Revolution 1910–1920
- Balkan Wars 1912–1913
- World War I in Europe 1914–1918
- World War I in the Ottoman Empire 1914–1918
- World War I for the United States, Canada and Australia 1914–1918
- Armenian genocide 1915–1917
- Great Migration of Black Americans 1916–1970
- Russian Revolution and Civil War 1917–1922
- 1918 influenza pandemic 1918–1920
- Turkish War of Independence and population exchange 1919–1923
- Irish War of Independence and Civil War 1919–1923
- Great Depression 1929–1939
- Dust Bowl 1930–1939
- Holodomor 1932–1933
- Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia 1935–1941
- Great Purge 1936–1938
- Spanish Civil War 1936–1939
- Second Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945
- World War II on the Eastern Front 1939–1945
- World War II in Western Europe 1939–1945