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  The stock market crashes, marking the end of six years of unparalleled prosperity for most sectors of the American economy.
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  "Food riots" begin to break out in parts of the U.S. In Minneapolis, several hundred men and women smash the windows of a grocery market and make off with food
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  Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected president in a landslide over Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt receives 22.8 million popular votes to Hoover's 15.75 million.
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  President Roosevelt, under the Emergency Banking Act, orders the nation off of the gold standard.
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  A three-day dust storm blows an estimated 350 million tons of soil off of the terrain of the West and Southwest.
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  December 1931
New York's Bank of the United States collapses. At the time of the collapse, the bank had over $200 million in deposits, making it the largest single bank failure in the nation's history. - 
  
  The war effort will jump-start U.S. industry and effectively end the Great Depression