Prohibition Ends - Depression - Hindenburg - Berlin Olympics
Famous Photographs of the 1930s that Changed the World

The Great Depression 1930-1939. During this time the prices of stock fell 40%. 9,000 banks went out of business. 9 million savings accounts were wiped out. 86,00 businesses failed. Wages decreased by 60% which left 15 million jobless people. This photo by photographer Dorothea Lange has become one the world's most famous photos.

At the height of the Great Depression Lange photographed the woman and her two small children. It came to epitomize the poverty & suffering of those displaced. Dorothea Lange’s photography was to inspire Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” which in turn inspired John Ford’s film adaptation.

Dorothea Lange continues to work primarily as a documentary photographer throughout her career, photographing the underprivileged and destitute of America. In 1972, the Whitney Museum commemorates her work on the Japanese internment camps in the US during World War II in an exhibit about internment

The famous picture of the airship Hindenburg as it exploded and crashed spectacularly while docking at Lakehurst, NJ  May 6, 1937 and 35 people died      10 Most Expensive Photographs Sold

Lynching 1930 A mob of 10,000 whites took sledgehammers to the county jailhouse doors to get at these two young blacks accused of raping a white girl. The girl's uncle saved the life of a third by proclaiming the man's innocence.

Although this was Marion, Indiana most of the 5,000 lynchings documented between Reconstruction and the late 1960s were perpetrated in the South.

Hangings, beatings and mutilations were called the sentence of "Judge Lynch" Some lynching photos were made into postcards designed to boost white supremacy, but the tortured bodies and grotesquely happy crowds ended up revolting many

From January 1920 Prohibition became Law Bootlegging fell under the control of criminal gangs who went to war with each other to secure profits. Seven members of the O'Banion-Moran gangs were lined up in a Chicago warehouse in 1929 and gunned down in what became known as the St Valentine's Day Massacre