1935: The U.S. Congress enacts legislation creating the Works Progress Administration, later known as the Works Project Administration, or WPA, which ends up employing more than 8 million people during the Great Depression.

1932: The market crashes on nothing but rumors. First, word spreads that French speculators are short-selling the U.S. dollar to force the U.S. to follow Britain's lead in abandoning the gold standard. Then gossips chatter that a huge "bear raid," or manipulation of stocks by short-sellers, will be launched on the New York Stock Exchange the following morning. Stocks plunge, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing 6.4% in intraday trading and recovering only slightly to close at 62.90, off 5.0% for the day. The U.S. Senate, already furious that stocks have lost 29.2% over the past month, suddenly schedules hearings into Wall Street's conduct for the following Monday morning.

John Brooks, Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920-1938 (Harper & Row, New York, 1969), p. 141;Phyllis S. Pierce, ed., The Dow Jones Averages 1885-1980 (DowJones Irwin, Homewood, IL, 1982), not paginated

1890: A backwoods prospector named Leonidas (Lon) Merritt scratches together $918 to buy 600 acres of land in the Mesabi Range near Duluth, Minn., at a land auction. He soon hits the world's richest vein of fine iron ore, cutting raw-material costs for the U.S. steel industry from $5 to $6 per ton of ore to just $2 to $3 per ton, a 60% drop in five years. But Merritt overexpands his Lake Superior Consolidated Iron Mines Co., and John D. Rockefeller ends up snatching it away for barely over $1 million. By 1905, Minnesota will produce 51% of all iron ore in the U.S.

Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Random House, New York, 1998), pp. 383-385