When did the Great Depression start?

Why this is the answer

The official answer points to one event: the stock market crash of 1929, which USCIS also calls the Great Crash. Either name is accepted, and both carry the year, which is the part to get right. Through the 1920s, share prices on the New York Stock Exchange climbed to heights no one had seen. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about six times over between August 1921 and September 1929. Ordinary people bought stocks with borrowed money, typically putting down a tenth of the price and borrowing the rest. The collapse came at the end of October. On Black Monday, October 28, 1929, the Dow fell nearly 13 percent, and on Black Tuesday, the next day, it fell almost 12 percent more. By mid-November it had lost almost half its value. The slide went on until the summer of 1932, when the index stood 89 percent below its peak, and it did not climb back to its 1929 high until 1954. The Federal Reserve's history site adds a detail the test does not ask for: the economic downturn had already begun in August 1929, and the crash was one of a series of financial crises that also included bank panics in 1930 and 1931. The USCIS materials treat the crash as the starting point, and that is the answer to give. Black Monday and Black Tuesday are good to know, but the test does not ask for either day, only the year. One wrong answer to watch for is 1933. That is the year Franklin Roosevelt took office, when the country was already deep in the Depression, so it marks the response rather than the beginning. Another slip is 1941, the year the United States entered World War II after Pearl Harbor, which is close to when the Depression ended. Keep the three dates in order and the question becomes simple: the crash in 1929, Roosevelt in 1933, the war in 1941.