Tiananmen Square

1989 was a year of crisis for Socialism. Socialist regimes were toppled in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria; the wall came down in Berlin and East Germans were free to leave. In China, Deng Xiaoping and other Communist reformers had been pushing for a freer economy, and revolution seemed just on the horizon.

On April 17, 1989, students gathered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in mourning for the Communist party member Hu Yaobang. Hu had been a reformer, advocating for a free market and more transparent government. The movement began as mourning, then turned into a protest for democracy. It continued to gain momentum until May 20. Worried about how to get rid of the protesters, the government declared martial law on May 20, 1989.

However, the protesters simply surrounded the military and tried to convince them to join the protesters. They even gave the soldiers food and water in a show of nonviolence. In the iconic video of Tiananmen's "Tank Man," the soldiers can't seem to hurt their own people. Tank Man, after blocking the leading tank's path, tries to talk to the tank driver.

Recognizing that these soldiers were not going to fire upon people just like them, the Communist government withdrew them. This seemed like a victory for the protesters, but the government simply re-thought how it would use military force.

Finally, on the evening of June 3rd, more troops were sent into Beijing. Unlike the previous troops, these soldiers were from rural parts of China, far removed from Beijing. The troops had also been told that the protesters were simply criminals who needed to be cleared from the square. And the dreams of democracy in China slipped away as the forces opened fire on protesters.

Now known as the June 4th massacre, a recently revealed reports logs the "minimum estimate" of deaths at 10,000 protesters. The government claimed that troops were acting in self-defense, but with a toll of 7 soldiers dead, this is blatantly unbelievable.

After the huge protests that had occurred, the Communist Party strengthened its grip on China's politics to make sure that this would not happen again. It's such a shame that China came so close to democracy, and yet, it is still a Communist country today.

Sources:
https://www.axios.com/declassified-cable-estimates-10000-killed-at-tiananmen-square-1515110832-471be650-3234-4535-b423-cbaa36329316.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989#Gathering_momentum
http://www.legacy.com/news/explore-history/article/hu-yaobang-and-tiananmen-square

The Curse of Going to Space: Cosmic Junk

2017 marked the 60th anniversary of Sputnik's successful launch into space. But the past successes of space launches have had an unanticipated consequence: space debris.

There are actually two kinds of space debris: natural (like meteoroids) and artificial (ie: man-made). Natural space debris generally orbits around the Sun, while man-made debris orbits around the Earth. The Earth-orbiting, human-made space junk is also referred to as orbital debris.

While it is not something we civilians think about when space travel comes to mind, NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris, Nicholas Johnson, says, “The greatest risk to space missions comes from non-trackable debris.” There are over 500,000 pieces of tracked orbital debris orbiting the Earth at up 17,500 miles per hour, and that is not even including the debris that is too small to track from Earth. According to NASA's website, "Even tiny paint flecks can damage a spacecraft when traveling at these velocities. In fact a number of space shuttle windows have been replaced because of damage caused by material that was analyzed and shown to be paint flecks."

Luckily, no disasters of the proportion of Gravity (starring Sandra Bullock) have taken place. But it's only a matter of time. And once some large piece of debris hits another large orbiting body, that collision will create even more orbital debris. And then that debris will hit other debris, and create more debris, and so on and so forth.

This doomsday scenario is called Kessler Syndrome. As far back as 1978, NASA scientist Donald Kessler predicted that someday there could be such a high density of orbital debris that collisions create only more debris that increase the probability of further collisions. If this threshold is reached, it could doom humans to the Earth forever.

Yet we still dream of the stars. SpaceX just successfully launched its Falcon Heavy rocket booster, propelling a Tesla into space. And, this company alone is planning to launch 11,943 satellites into space. In the current environment of orbital debris, this may not work out well, but fear not: people are already thinking up solutions.

Aerospace Corporation has created Brane Craft, a blanket-like, metal sheet that is supposed to wrap around space debris and pull it back into the atmosphere to burn up. Another (more exciting) approach proposed by the Air Force Engineering University in China is to blast debris with lasers. Yet another solution, from Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency, suggests using an electrodynamic tether (pictured below). It's basically a magnetic chord that uses electromagnetic force to redirect objects into the atmosphere.



Space junk is a problem for future extraterrestrial travelers, but it is not an unsolvable one. Hopefully, future generations, too, will have the chance to explore space: the final frontier.

Sources:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
https://www.wired.com/story/spacex-wants-to-launch-thousands-of-satellites-what-for/
https://www.space.com/38105-ultrathin-craft-could-destroy-space-junk.html
https://www.space.com/39412-china-satellite-lasers-clean-space-debris.html
https://www.space.com/38984-tiny-space-debris-sensor-to-station.html

Images:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/505020386/japan-sends-long-electric-whip-into-orbit-to-tame-space-junk

"You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant--except an Alice"

Last Thanksgiving, after eating way too much turkey and gravy, I was sitting in my living room with a bunch of 60-year-olds. One of them said, "Oh! We should listen to Alice's Restaurant." He said that it was a Thanksgiving tradition to listen to the song, and if it wasn't our tradition, it should be. He pulled out his phone and started playing it.

"Alice's Restaurant Massacree" is a rambling 18 and a half minute long song about a Thanksgiving misadventure of Arlo Guthrie. The song is a very humorous account of how Guthrie visited his friend Alice for Thanksgiving (she had a restaurant, but that is largely irrelevant to the story). 

Alice lived in a decommissioned church, and she had a lot of trash sitting in her house. Guthrie, being the good friend that he is, decided to take Alice's trash to the local dump. Guthrie put all the trash in his VW microbus (an iconic symbol of the 60s) and drove to the dump. Unfortunately, the dump was closed for Thanksgiving, so instead, Guthrie dumped the trash down a hill. Then, he came back to Alice's and had thanksgiving dinner.

The next day, Guthrie received a call from chief of police William "Obie" Obanhein. Guthrie admitted to dumping the trash and went down to the police station, where he was immediately arrested. Because the town he was in was very small, this littering crime was the biggest crime they'd had in years, so the cops used all the cop equipment they had, including "twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles / And arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each / One was." Alice then bailed Guthrie out of jail, and they had another Thanksgiving dinner.

Guthrie then went to court, where the police proudly displayed their "twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles / And arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each / One was." Unfortunately, the judge was blind, so the "twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles / And arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each / One was" were obsolete. Guthrie was fined $50 and that was the end of that.

At this point in the song, Guthrie says, "but that's not / What I came to tell you about / [I] Came to talk about the draft." Of course. 

Guthrie tells how he was drafted for the Vietnam war, and he went to get his physical examination (or as he says, to "get injected, inspected, detected, infected, / Neglected and selected"). The song starts becoming tangibly anti-war at this point; Guthrie says that he wanted to convince the psychiatrist he was not mentally fit to serve, so he started jumping up and down and screaming, "KILL!" Guthrie then says that the sergeant came and told him, "You're our boy."

It goes on, and it turns out in the end that the only reason Guthrie wasn't actually selected for service was because he was a criminal: his littering fine was a crime on his record.

The song ends with Guthrie encouraging listeners to protest against the draft and the war. The particular form of protest he suggests is reciting some of the chorus of "Alice's Restaurant Massacree."  He says, "walk into / The shrink wherever you are, just walk in say 'Shrink, You can get

Anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.' And walk out."

Here we finally get to the political heart of the song, as Guthrie says, 

"if... just one person does it they may think he's really sick and

They won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony

... they won't take either of them

And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in

Singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an

Organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said

Fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and

Walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement."

"Alice's Restaurant Massacree" is not even really a song. It's mostly a monologue, an anti-war narrative told by Arlo Guthrie and punctuated by a chorus of "You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant." But at last Thanksgiving, I sat between a group of Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarians, all of whom were singing along happily to the song. Even though the music of the 60s counterculture was created to serve the purpose of the counterculture, good music is enjoyed by everyone. 

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Restaurant_Massacree

https://genius.com/Arlo-guthrie-alices-restaurant-massacree-lyrics 

Camelot: The Myth of JFK

When most Americans think of JFK, they see the image of a courageous, noble leader who fought righteously for the good of all Americans. But he did have flaws: Kennedy further entangled the US in the Vietnam war (now widely regarded as a bad move), and he had extra-marital affairs, which are contrary to the perfect family man image that he is remembered for. However, none of these flaws seem to tarnish Kennedy's sparkling reputation, and this is in large part to the myth of Camelot.

Jackie Kennedy was a shrewd woman, and she wanted to make sure that her late husband was remembered for all of his greatness and none of his flaws. So, shortly after her husband's death, she had an interview with journalist Theodore White in which she introduced the idea of Camelot.

At the time, there was a fairly popular Broadway musical called Camelot. In the musical, King Arthur was portrayed as a peacemaker trying to stop the world from falling into war. Jackie Kennedy seized on this image and tried to equate this to John Kennedy. In the interview with White, Jackie Kennedy said that John Kennedy was a huge fan of the musical and liked the last lines of the song called "Camelot," too. The lines are: “Don’t ever let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was Camelot.”

As the American public grieved, they quickly latched onto this nostalgic myth about Kennedy's presidency. Jackie Kennedy did a very good job of immortalizing her husband as a peacemaker trying to keep the world from destructive war, even if that wasn't totally true. This myth is so powerful that, even today, Kennedy's term is remembered as a nostalgic and passionate one.

Sources:
https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/THWPP-059-009.aspx
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-jackie-kennedy-invented-the-camelot-legend-after-jfks-death
http://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/john-f-kennedy#section_6

Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Malraux_Dinner_-_President_and_First_Lady%2C_Mme._Malraux%2C_and_Isaac_Stern%2C_11_May_1962.jpg

Austria in the Post-War World

After the end of WWII, the Nazi-German state was split apart. We already learned that Germany was partitioned into British, French, Soviet, and American sectors, as was its capital Berlin. But what is less known is that the same thing happened in Austria: the country as a whole and the capital of Vienna were divided among the same 4 allies.

When WWII ended, the Sudetenland (one of the first territories the Nazi's had taken) was returned to Czechoslovakia. Ethnic German citizens, like my grandmother and her parents, feared reprisals from other ethnic groups and fled to Austria. These refugees were distributed among different parts of Austria. My grandmother had family in the Austrian city of Bad Ischl, but the town had no more housing available for refugees, so they were forced to go to the nearby town of Bad Goisern (in the American sector of Austria). My grandmother was one year old at the time, and they were lucky to find housing in an apartment set aside for refugees.

However, other members of my family were less lucky. My great-grandmother's sister was living in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down, and it wasn't until about 40 years later that they finally saw each other again. My grandmother wasn't able meet her own cousins until they were in their forties.

The Berlin Wall didn't come down until 1989, but there was one time when my grandma and grandpa were able to visit before while the partition was still in place. My mother and her siblings asked for a present (as all little kids do when their parents go on a trip), and my mom still remembers that all of the consumer goods (especially snack foods) were much poorer quality than what she had in non-Communist Austria. My mom's parents even brought her an East German, state-commissioned cassette about a boy named Alfons Zitterbacke. Just like other East German consumer products, it didn't live up to the standard of capitalist children's cassettes.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied-occupied_Austria

Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Allied_occupation_in_Austria_%281945-1955%29.png

The Partition of India

After World War II, Britain's economy and military were too weak to sustain the vast British Empire, and it had to let many colonies gain independence. Britain lost the jewel of its empire too: India.

India independence was nothing new: there had long been independence movements (such as Gandhi's non-cooperation movement of 1930), and the British had even granted Indians control of everything except foreign policy in 1935. But there were also social problems in independence, particularly religion.

In British India, Hindus were the religious majority (almost 80% of the population), but Muslims made up a pretty sizable minority (around 20%). Muslims experienced political protection under British rule, such as having some percent of government seats reserved for Muslims. The prospect of independence led Muslims to fear losing those securities. Thus, as independence loomed closer, Muslims pushed for creating two separate independent states from colonial India: India and Pakistan.

Pakistan was separated into West and East Pakistan (later to become Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively). However, the boundaries of the two states were not very carefully drawn, meaning there were millions of Hindus in the Muslim majority Pakistan, not to mention there were already millions of Muslims in India. This led to mass displacement of people, with nearly 16 million people uprooted in the hopes of going someplace more peaceful for people of their religion. The partitioning of India into India and Pakistan sparked mass migrations: Hindus who were living in areas that were now Pakistan flocked to India, and Muslims from areas that were now officially designated as Hindu-majority India fled to Pakistan.

The mixing of these two religious groups that had a history of conflict led to violence, with death toll estimates of up to 2 million. Seeing as this was only 70 years ago, there are still survivors to tell of the horrors that took place.
For example, my paternal grandfather was 6 years old and living in the Punjab region, which was split by the partition between West Pakistan and India. His family was Hindu, and, unfortunately, they were living on the Pakistani side of the region. He told me how his whole village was burned in one day. His family had little time to flee, so little, that they left my grandfather behind. He hid in the empty wood-burning stove until his sister came back for him, and they luckily survived.

Many refugees fled on trains packed full with passengers, making them easy targets for looters and pillagers. Some trains (called "blood trains") rolled into their destinations filled with only dead bodies. Train carriages were also marked to tell outsiders whether the passengers had any money, and therefore if they were worth stealing from.

The sheer scale of the atrocities was, and still is, hard to comprehend. While it didn't affect the US too much, the Indian partition just goes to show that the collapse of imperialism with the end of WWII had sharp consequences.

Sources:
http://theconversation.com/how-the-partition-of-india-happened-and-why-its-effects-are-still-felt-today-81766
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/70-years-later-survivors-recall-the-horrors-of-india-pakistan-partition/2017/08/14/3b8c58e4-7de9-11e7-9026-4a0a64977c92_story.html?utm_term=.cea1ccbacee5
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/ks3/history/uk_through_time/british_empire_through_time/revision/6/

Image:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Partition_of_India.PNG

Charles de Gaulle in WWII

Charles Andre Joseph Marie de Gaulle (more commonly referred to as Charles de Gaulle) is famed for being the leader of the Free French Resistance to Nazi-occupied France during WWII.

De Gaulle had wanted to join the military from a young age, and, after completing his military education at Saint-Cyr academy, he joined the infantry. While in the infantry, de Gaulle's lieutenant was Philippe Petain, a man who de Gaulle would repeatedly encounter throughout his life.

De Gaulle fought in WWI, and was captured by the Germans at the Battle of Verdun. He learned much from his experience in WWI, and wrote many books about the French military after the wars end. In one of his books, de Gaulle outlined the weaknesses of the French military in the hopes that they would be changed, but the French government paid little attention to his book. Ironically, Germans did pay attention to the book, following some of his recommendations as they geared up for WWII.

During WWII, France was occupied by the Nazi's, and the puppet Vichy France was installed in 1940 with no other than Philippe Petain as the French leader. De Gaulle, however, refused to recognize Petain's government, so he fled to Britain where he tried to further French resistance. From London, de Gaulle made a radio announcement asking the French people to resist against the Vichy government.

That same year, de Gaulle was recognized by the British as the leader of the Free France resistance movement. De Gaulle successfully united other resistance movements to create a shadow government that helped to defeat the Germans.

After WWII, de Gaulle took on a very politcally active life, notably serving as president of France, until his resignation from the presidency in 1969. De Gaulle is largely regarded as a French hero, and has been memorialized (the Paris airport bears his name, among other things).

Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Free-French
https://www.biography.com/people/charles-de-gaulle-9269794
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-de-Gaulle-president-of-France
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/britain-recognizes-general-charles-de-gaulle-as-the-leader-of-the-free-french

Image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Second_World_War_Personalities-_Charles_De_Gaulle_D1966.jpg

SPAM

Whether you love or despise the canned meat, Spam has become an icon of American production during World War II.


Launched by Hormel Foods in 1937, Spam is made of 6 ingredients: pork should with ham (this counts as one ingredient), salt, water, potato starch, sugar, and sodium nitrite. Come WWII, the US military purchased over 100 million pounds of Spam to feed to troops abroad.


With the American military's presence in Southeast Asia, Spam also reached local populations there. The meat products became very popular there because they kept well, even when they were left unrefrigerated in the tropical climate. According to spam.com (Hormel's website specifically for this product), "[i]n Southeast Asia, SPAM® products are given as a luxury gift" even today.


Another reason for Spam's popularity in Hawaii was the government's response to Pearl Harbor. The US government could not intern all of Hawaii's Japanese population, so instead they restricted industries like deep-sea fishing that employed many Japanese-Americans. Without fish, Spam became the best source of protein. Now, Hawaiians consume 7 million cans of Spam every year, and hold an annual SPAM® JAM festival dedicated to Hormel's canned meat.


While Spam came to be warmly embraced by the communities of Hawaii and Southeast Asia, American GI's did not do the same: Hormel received an unprecedented amount of hate mail from American troops who had received Spam! Jay Hormel himself, the founder of Hormel Foods, thought this abuse was unwarranted, saying the soldiers "ought to have eaten the bully beef we had in the last war" (Eater.com link).


But Spam really does not need their validation: immortalized by Monty Python's Spamalot, Hawaii's obsession with Spam musubi, and public recognition around the world, Spam is an incredible legacy of World War II.

Sources:
http://www.spam.com/
https://www.eater.com/2014/7/9/6191681/a-brief-history-of-spam-an-american-meat-icon

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wanderingmagpie/3842228853/in/photolist-6RwqM4-ag76WB-4BQV4s-UiQ8cT-H7e8PM-7MXN6u-6PyBpo-6AKEZM-T2twvA-ndWDWc-aD8BXo-aFS3e4-6s5bdd-9nhwTn-b6U4sv-bqnbPQ-5DYYf-JcUZbw-bgUujF-eHNbLF-8BRibb-BfEZU-f1mXtn-5YCvPm-5yRQkp-37if33-bCVHPB-nkSKo9-hkBiUv-xi44w-o1hxqL-hXWc2B-7MYVdx-p7QPSG-4WpUNY-CpgsMt-8s4nUx-7N3V3E-7MYVcB-7CaiFi-DUUsN5-T5eyMi-7N3UC7-a46EZP-7fabCu-Cq6NfP-2Uzrbv-oeh26z-fg6oqU-DLguA

Österreich oder so

Even though he became an ultra-German dictator, Adolf Hitler was not originally from Germany; he was from Austria!

Attending high school in Linz and pursuing an art career in Vienna, Hitler spent many of his early years in Austria. (FYI, Hitler was rejected from art school in Vienna.) Maybe to deal with his rejection (we'll never know), Hitler joined the Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeitpartei (also known as the Nazi party). When WWI came around, Hitler fought for the Germans, not the Austrians.

Hitler probably liked Germany more because Nazism was more popular there than in Austria. Before Austria was annexed by Germany, Austria too was a dictatorship, but its chancellor, Engelbert Dolfuss, outlawed the National Socialist political parties (including the Austrian Nazis). However, Nazi attacks and influence only continued to grow, and when Dolfuss changed the Republic of Austria to a fascist state, he was assassinated by Nazis (who were fascists in Germany, curiously enough). Finally, on March 13, 1938, Austria was officially consolidated into the German state.

Aryanization and genocide also came with Austria being absorbed into the Third Reich. The Ebensee Concentration Camp in the Salzkammergut region of Austria was renowned for its high death rates. The site of the camp has now been memorialized, and has a museum where people can learn about the atrocities that took place.

In response to the terrible things that happened during WWII, Austria enacted a permanent neutrality act on October 26, 1955, now celebrated as the Austrian National Day. While the US' national day (the Fourth of July) celebrates American war, the Austrian National Day celebrates the vow not to get into wars in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#Early_years
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/higher/history/roadwar/anschluss/revision/1/
http://countrystudies.us/austria/41.htm
https://ww2db.com/country/Austria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria_in_the_time_of_National_Socialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebensee_concentration_camp#Post-war_commemoration
http://www.austria.org/national-day/

Image: Hitler's speech in Vienna's Heldenplatz
http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/images/highres_30014481.jpg

Meiji Restoration in Japan

Before the 19th century, Japan was a feudal society ruled by tradition, not technology (think of the society in 47 Ronin).  Perhaps the reason in why Japan was able to achieve such rapid industrialization lies in the type of feudal society that Japan was.

In feudal Europe, there were local lords who had their own military protection (knights and stuff). Thus, there was lots of violent conflict between nearby lords, which got in the way of peaceful advance in things like technology or art. However, in Japan, even feudal society was more organized:
 - local lords were called daimyos, and they ruled over designated regions
 - there was also a shogun, who controlled the daimyos and reserved the right to interact with foreign countries
The fact that the shogun held more power than any of the daimyos helped to stifle power struggles between the daimyos, and promoted more peace.
Thus, even in feudal Japan, there was considerable infrastructure, including waterways to prevent flooding and facilitate trade. This infrastructure made quick industrial scaling possible during the 19th and 20th centuries.

After the fall of the Japanese Tokugawa government, the Meiji government took its place. This government committed itself to make Japan economically and militarily stronger by re-aligning itself with the already powerful and wealthy Western powers.

Another incentive for Westernization was maintaining sovereignty of Japan. Throughout Asia, European countries had established many colonies to further cement their power, and Japan did not want to be turned into a colony like Singapore or the Philippines. So, the Meiji government sent the Iwakure Mission to learn how the Western countries came to power, and how Japan could do the same. With this knowledge, the Meiji government embraced industrialization and rapid westernization.

Japan first focused on independent economic growth, and with this newfound wealth, Japan increased its military capacities. The rapid advancement in the economy was aided by concentration in the form of zaibatsu, which means financial cliques. Unlike American monopolies, however, these were large companies that lowered production costs by gaining profits in one sector and using those profits to pay for advancement in another sector. This allowed for traditional economic activities like farming to not only coexist but aid the economy's modernization.

https://eh.net/encyclopedia/japanese-industrialization-and-economic-growth/
http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_1750_meiji.htm
https://searchinginhistory.blogspot.com/2015/05/fukoku-kyohei-slogan-that-defined-meiji.html
Photo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Marunouchi_London_Street_1920s.jpg

The Speculation Craze Before the Depression

One of the oft-cited causes of the Great Depression was the speculation craze on Wall Street. But what does this actually mean? What is speculation, and what sorts of practices on Wall Street led to the market crash of 1929 that marked the start of the Great Depression?

Buying on Margin
Buying on margin is a fancy way of saying that you are buying stock with loaned money. The money is loaned by a stock broker. People often do this when they want to buy a lot of stock, but they don't have enough money for it themselves, so they get loans. If the price of the stock you buy goes up, then when you sell it, you have more money than what you bought it for, so you can repay your loan with interest and still make money. But, when the stock price goes down, you can lose money and possibly be unable to pay back the loan. Nowadays, we have restrictions on buying on margin, but in 1929, there were no such safety nets.

Speculation
Trading risky stock in the hopes that the stock price goes up is called speculation. It is little more than gambling: investors they buy stock and simply hope that it goes up in value. When stock prices were increasing, this seemed like an easy, surefire way to make money: you buy some stock, and then sell it when its price goes up. These investors are bullish, which means they expect the stock price to increase. During the 1920s, there were hardly any bearish investors, which means they expect the stock price to decrease. This imbalance meant that one fall in the market was enough to send everyone selling. And sure enough, on October 24, 1929, the market crashed.

While Wall Street was an easy scapegoat for the Depression's economic woes, investors were hardly the only people at fault. The Depression, and the stock market crash of 1929, were due to lack of market regulation, overproduction, concentration of wealth, and a poor banking system as well.

Sources:
https://www.investopedia.com/study-guide/series-4/introduction/bullish-vs-bearish/
http://www.investopedia.com/university/margin/margin1.asp
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-1929-stock-market-crash/
http://www.encyclopedia.com/economics/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/causes-great-depression-0
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/speculation.asp

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (or something)

When looking back at antisemitism in the 1930s, we often think that German Fascists were the sole offenders. But as the economy continued to crumble, many Americans turned to radical ideologies like antisemitism.

One prime example of American antisemitism is Charles Coughlin, the notable radio preacher whose messages reached over 30 million people. Coughlin's radio career began by preaching Catholic views, but as it became more political, Coughlin expressed sympathy with Hitler and read excerpts from the text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

This text is pretty shady stuff: the gist of the manuscript is that there's a bunch of Jewish leaders of some kind (sometimes called Elders of Zion, sometimes called rabbis) who get together in the middle of the night to make a plan of how to take over the world. Of course, their scheming is all generic things that anyone would do to take over the world (control the media, manipulating the economy, and all that jazz), and it contains no specifics.

But a great deal of the writing is plagiarized from other sources, including a French anti-Napoleon pamphlet. While the French pamphlet had nothing to do with Jewish people, once the German anti-semite got a hold of it, he turned it into a Jewish conspiracy theory. It was translated into Russian in 1872 and was made popular after the Russian Revolution in the early 1900s, when it was used as a way to incite popular hatred against Jews.

Despite all this nonsense, The Protocols was still popular. Henry Ford even sponsored the distribution of the text, not to mention Charles Coughlin's readings from it.

While The Protocols may seem like the first modern conspiracy theory (some crazy, uncorroborated jumble of plagiarism), it had serious consequences: the text was even used as a justification for the genocide of Jews in Germany. Nazi Germany had the most obvious display of antisemitism, but their sentiments were (unfortunately) not alone in the early 20th century.

Sources:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6012010
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford#The_Dearborn_Independent_and_antisemitism
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-ldquo-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-rdquo

Eugenics in America

Eugenics is the practice of deliberately selecting traits in humans to be passed onto future generations. Eugenics as we know it today began in the late 1800s, around the time Civil War Reconstruction was ending. This was also the time when Darwin's theory of evolution was becoming more widely accepted, and it was easy for people to transition from natural selection to human designed selection. However, along with the idea that some traits should be promoted among humans, there was also the belief that other traits should be deliberately weeded out. This came to be the defense of racial supremacy: there are certain races that are genetically superior, and others should be weeded out or excluded from reproducing with the superior races.

The best example of eugenics promoted by a government has to be Nazi Germany. Hitler was a huge believer in eugenics, and he made sure German citizens people of the pure "Aryan" race. However, Hitler himself commended another country on its eugenicist progress: the US.
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American eugenicist scientists claimed that people of Eastern and Southeastern European descent must be "lower" races because they had higher proportions in jails and mental institutions than other ethnicities. Although this was a classic mix-up of causation versus correlation, this was used as scientific evidence to support the Immigration Act of 1924. The Act restricted the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southeastern European countries allowed into the US. 

Even more ominous, though, were the forced sterilization programs embraced in the name of eugenics. As proud as Californians may be about our just and liberal state, "Beginning in 1909 and continuing for 70 years, California led the country in the number of sterilization procedures performed on men and women, often without their full knowledge and consent" (UCSB link). These sterilizations were done mainly on prison populations, but it was also driven by anti-Asian and anti-Mexican sentiments. In other parts of the US, race also played into coerced sterilization. Native Americans, black people, and Mexicans were disproportionately targeted by these practices. Why? Because eugenics was used as a justification for marginalizing minority populations. While groups of people may end up disproportionately represented in prisons or mental institutions due to their circumstances (like histories of discrimination), eugenicists assumed their faults were due to the inherent nature of this group of people.

But the craziest thing about the eugenics craze is the Buck v. Bell case that went to the Supreme Court in 1927. A Virginia law requiring the women be sterilized if they were diagnosed with weak mindedness was upheld in the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice Holmes' opinion summed up the nation's acceptance of eugenics nicely: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" (History.state.gov link).
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Though eugenics has largely been debunked, it just goes to show that America is not the haven of equality and acceptance of diversity that we wish it was.

https://www.britannica.com/science/eugenics-genetics 
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act 
http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/015287/politics-female-biology-and-reproduction 
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/ 

Selfishness, Hamilton, and Money

The very same year the US declared independence from Britain, the great Adam Smith published his manuscript An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (commonly referred to as The Wealth of Nations). This book was completely different from the traditional version of commerce that most countries sought: mercantilism. Mercantilism is the economic ideology that a nation amasses wealth by exporting more than it imports, and thus collecting money, valuable goods, or gold (whatever it measures wealth in). 
Smith's economy, however, was all about free trade, where everyone could trade whatever they wanted/needed, no matter if it was an import or an export. Smith's ideas were based on the idea that all people are selfish, and he famously wrote, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." His point was, if one could make a system where everyone could trade of their own will (called a free market), then everyone would get what they wanted. The consumer could buy the products they like, and the seller could get money (which they like, too). 

Alexander Hamilton was of the merchant class, and merchants came to love and live by Smith's economic ideas. Hamilton's idea of the Federal Bank also took advantage of the ideas that the government could profit by harnessing people's self-interest. Debt does not seem like something anyone would want to buy, but if you add a little incentive (like interest), that quickly changes. Now, rich people with extra money laying around and can buy bonds that they will be repaid for later, but with interest! Now, buying the government's debt can be profitable to people, so they are motivated to do that. They don't want to help the government out of the goodness of their hearts, they want to do it because they can get something out of it.

The idea that people are selfish is an important one when it comes to economics and politics. People's opinions of which work better, capitalism or communism, often boil down to the question of if they think humans are innately selfish. Systems that prosper when people are self-centered (like democracy and capitalism) tend to be more successful than systems that require everyone wanting to be equal and sharing (communism). Does the relative success of selfish societies prove that all people are selfish, or is it just chance and circumstance that caused the differences? That is up to you to decide.
http://www.investopedia.com/updates/adam-smith-wealth-of-nations/