The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from 1929 to 1939. It began after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and employment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country’s banks had failed.
In 1793, Eli Whitney invented a simple machine that influenced the history of the United States. He invented a cotton gin that was popular in the South. The South became the cotton producing part of the country because Whitney's cotton gin was able to successfully pull out the seeds from the cotton bolls.
<span>During the early 1960s, NASA’s Mercury program sent Americans into space.</span>
