Background
The period preceding the depression was dominated by several major military conflicts and a period of economic expansion. In Europe, the end of the Franco-Prussian War yielded a new political order in Germany, and the £200 million reparations imposed on France led to an inflationary investment boom in Germany and central Europe. New technologies in industry such as the Bessemer converter were being rapidly applied; railroads were booming. In the United States, the end of the American Civil War and a brief post-war recession (1865–1867) gave way to such an investment boom, focused especially on railroads on public lands in the West - an expansion funded greatly by foreign investors.
Read more about this topic: Long Depression
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“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
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—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)