Skip to main contentSkip to navigation
Print subscriptions
Sign in
Search jobs
Search
The Guardian - Back to homeThe Guardian

The 1930s revisited

The Guardian takes a special look back at an era bookended by the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the outbreak of the second world war, and asks: what lessons can be learnt from this 'low, dishonest decade'?

11 March 2017

  • Orson Welles (right) as Brutus in his 1937 New York production of Julius Caesar.

    From Brecht to Lorca, the playwrights who became theatre's freedom fighters

  • An international collection of propaganda posters from before and during the second world war.

    Death of truth: when propaganda and 'alternative facts' first gripped the world

  • Jonathan Freedland

    The 1930s were humanity's darkest, bloodiest hour. Are you paying attention?

    Jonathan Freedland
  • British prime minister Neville Chamberlain announces the start of war on 3 September 1939.

    'We must not fail': Manchester Guardian reacts to outbreak of second world war

10 March 2017

  • 9th September 1938: German dictator Adolf Hitler addresses his army, which fills Zeppelin Field during the Nazi Party Congress, Nuremberg, Germany.

    Countdown to the second world war - in pictures

    Political rallies in Germany and the UK were focus points for the rise of fascism and a place of growing demonstration

4 March 2017

  • The economist John Maynard Keynes suggested the world was entering a new dark age in the 1930s.

    'Like Judgment Day' … How commentators viewed the Great Depression

  • The Enigma of Hitler by Salvador Dalí, 1939

    Dali's enigma, Picasso's protest: the most important artworks of the 1930s

  • Parched … a family in Pittsburg County, Oklahoma, is forced to leave their home during the Great Depression because of drought.

    Crash course: what the Great Depression reveals about our future

  • Sainsbury’s Leatherhead shop where Marjorie Broad’s brother Frank worked from 1931 to 1939, when he was called up for the armed forces.

    'We'd been cowed by the Depression; that's why we could fight the war'

  • Hunger, outrage and bombs: how the Manchester Guardian reported the 1930s

  • Are the 2010s really like the 1930s? The truth about life in the Great Depression

3 March 2017

  • Jarrow March<br>Jarrow marchers passing throught the village of Lavendon, near Bedford, on their way to London, many playing mouth organs to keep spirits up. The Jarrow March was a hunger march during the Great Depression, starting in Jarrow it reached London a month later to put pressure on the coalition government of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. (Photo by Savill/Getty Images)

    From bread lines to hunger marches: street photography in the 1930s

    Throughout this troubled decade, people took to the streets to seek fair treatment, the right to work – or just some scraps of food
Explore more on these topics
  翻译：