Mason's Haven

              The Great Depression was a worldwide event that kicked off with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929. The general causes for the crash are understood to be the accumulation of easy credit based on an overly optimistic financial outlook throughout the 1920s. This trend resulted in risky credit decisions on the part of banks and other lenders, including loaning money for marginal investments. The rising debt across the board created market instability and eventually led to the crash.             The primary economic theories have reached a rough consensus that world governments were too slow to react to the crash and subsequent business failures, leaving lenders holding the bag, often with no way to liquefy what assets they had. It is generally asserted that governments should have quickly lowered interest rates, lowered taxes, and injected cash into the system to ease liquidity problems. Most governments either did not take these actions or waited too long before a

  Henry Ford was perhaps the most influential entrepreneur of the early twentieth century. Raised on a farm near Detroit, Michigan, Ford disliked farm work and went to work as a machinist in his teens. In the 1870s, Ford began experimenting with steam engines and by the mid-1880s was working on early internal combustion engines. 1887 saw the completion of a four-cycle engine of his own design. This was followed by a two-cylinder motor in 1890. Ford, in his autobiography, said he completed his first automobile in 1892. It was powered by a two-cylinder, four horsepower engine and could travel at speeds up to twenty miles per hour. It rode on four bicycle wheels with rubber tires and was dubbed the “quadricycle.” He eventually built three of these vehicles, each an improvement upon its predecessor. Ford had gone to work for Thomas Edison’s Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit in 1891 as an engineer. He became chief engineer in 1893 and his work with powered automobiles drew Edison’s p

              The coal industry, embattled as it is in the twenty-first century, was a vital part of American industrialization and expansion in the century after the Civil War. Prior to the war, coal was essentially a cottage industry run by small, independent operators in support of the emerging railroad companies and only beginning to supplant timber as heating and industrial fuel.                The war itself created a huge demand for coal as the iron and steel industries ramped up in response to the needs of the war industries, especially in the North. Coal not only fired weapons production, but also railroads, whose construction and use exploded in the war years. With the expansion of railroads came the ability to transport coal in large amounts, not only to the factories, but to the urban centers themselves, allowing for cheaper, more efficient fuel for everyone.             The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the great western expansion, made possible by the