1775 – The Second Continental Congress meets, the American Revolutionary War begins 1776 – The Second Continental Congress approves and signs the Declaration of Independence 1777 – The Second Continental Congress adopts the Articles of Confederation 1781 – Bank of North America
Continental Currency—1776 1787 – The Constitutional Convention takes place in Philadelphia 1791 – First Bank of the United States
First Bank of the United States—1800 1812 – War of 1812
A View of the Bombardment of Fort McHenry—1819 1817 – Second Bank of the United States
Second Bank of the United States—1827 1828 – Andrew Jackson becomes President 1832 – Andrew Jackson vs. Nicholas Biddle
Set to Between Old Hickory and Bully Nick—1834 1837 – Panic of 1837
The Times—1837 The Era of “Free” Banking The Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad Bank $2 bill—1854 1856 – Robert Latham Owen is born 1857 – Panic of 1857 Run on the Seamen's Savings' Bank During the Panic—1857 1861 – The Civil War
Five Dollar "Greenback"—1862
One Hundred Dollars Confederate Currency—1862 1869 – The First Transcontinental Railroad is finished 1873 – Panic of 1873
Run on the Fourth National Bank, No. 20 Nassau Street—1873 1877 – Reconstruction ends The Long Depression
We've All Got to Retrench—1893 1884 – Panic of 1884
$2 Silver Treasury Note—1896 1889 – The Land Run of 1889 1893 – Panic of 1893
Coxey's Army in Camp—1894 1898 – The Spanish-American War 1907 – Panic of 1907
The Central Bank—1910 1913 – The Federal Reserve Act is signed into law 1914 – World War I
Liberty Bond Drive Poster—1918 1927 – Charles Lindbergh makes the first trans-Atlantic flight, and the first motion picture with sound is released The Great Depression
Family in front of their shack at May Avenue Camp in Oklahoma City—1939 Image courtesy of the Library of Congress: link While many different people and institutions attempted to end the Depression, none of the solutions put forward had a dramatic effect on the crisis. President Roosevelt’s New Deal and several banking laws helped, but by 1940 the unemployment rate was still at 15 percent. It was the start of World War II and the increased war production in American factories that finally broke the Great Depression, as the United States attained almost 100 percent employment. 1941 – World War II The Federal Reserve helped the United States fund the war by once again selling war bonds to generate money. Buy War Bonds—1942 1948 –The Berlin Airlift Occurs 1950 – The Korean War begins and lasts three years 1954 – The Supreme Court rules on Brown v. Board of Education, de-segregating public schools 1963 – March on Washington, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1969 – The Woodstock Music & Art Fair takes place in Bethel Woods, New York 1974 – Nixon Resigns 1979 – The Iran Hostage Crisis 1982 – Penn Square Bank and the Oil Market Crash Without the high oil prices, oil and gas companies started to go under. This meant they couldn’t pay Penn Square Bank for their loans, and Penn Square Bank couldn’t pay their investors. Penn Square Bank failed in 1982. The deposits in the bank at that time were valued at 470 million dollars. The FDIC didn’t have enough money in reserve to insure all of the bank’s deposits, and no other bank wanted to assume responsibility for deposits at such a large sum. Banks from across the United States had invested in the oil company loans at Penn Square Bank and many of them looked ready to fail. Even Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company, the seventh largest bank in the United States, was failing. The FDIC and the Federal Reserve stepped in and saved Continental, preventing its total failure, in 1984. This was the largest government seizure of a bank, until the failure of Washington Mutual in 2008. In the end, 139 banks in Oklahoma and 737 banks nationwide failed as part of the same crisis that claimed the Penn Square Bank.
Newspaper Headlines from the Savings and Loan Crisis—1942 1991 – The World Wide Web debuts as an Internet service 1999 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 10,000 for the first time 2001 – The September 11th attack on the World Trade Center occurs 2004 – Facebook launches 2008 – The Great Recession
Trading Floor of the New York Stock Exchange—August, 2008 |