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The Legacy Of The Vietnam War

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Cellular telephones, Pepsi Max, and Pacemakers- all of these were invented in Jerald Brenhofer’s lifetime1. From the invention of cellphones that allowed him to talk with his expanding family as it spread beyond his physical reach to Boston and Chicago, to his favorite soda, Brenhofer lived a rich life, full of his favorite things and people. Born in 1942, in the throes of World War II and the lingering aftershocks of the Great Depression, the movement of social and technological change that Brenhofer experienced was more than a quantitative list of advancements and historical events, but the melding of the two into a continual and formative span of life.
The upheavals that Brenhofer would come face to face with in his time were …show more content…

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Great Depression changed the lives of everyone on a global scale, but the economic and social change in America was incomparable. In 1929, the unemployment rate was at a mere 3.2%, but by 1933 however, a massive 25% of citizens were without jobs. To truly understand the enormity of this decline in the working population, one must first understand the causes of the depression itself. On October 29th, 1929 a crash in the stock market, known today as Black Tuesday, contributed to a drastic decline in the value of stocks and assets of banks. The massive hit that many of these banks took to their assets forced many of them into failure, and they took the savings and fall-back plans of millions of Americans with them. Without the banks, ordinary people had no access to their own savings and many people’s homes were foreclosed upon. Following the loss of the banks, unemployment also skyrocketed since people weren’t able to buy goods without access to what they had thought was their money. If there is no demand for products in a market like the United States’, then there is no demand for the production of those goods, and that very production of consumer goods was the trade that many of those hurt the worst by the Great Depression relied upon.2 This vicious cycle was one that would continue to plague the country until a new problem, the

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