In 1933, responding to widespread criticisms that American education was out of step with the times, the U.S. Office of Education asked progressive historian Charles Beard to supply high-school libraries with a book list designed to "acquaint teachers and pupils with facts, known and unknown, about this new world we are entering."

In 1930 the New Orleans school board hired sociologist Mabel Byrd to investigate black labor conditions in New Orleans and to recommend an appropriate system of African American education. Byrd concluded that African Americans should be given a high-school curriculum designed to improve their low-wage work skills but not their intellectual competence, so as to prevent "increasing competition between the races."

Chemist James B. Conant succeeded A. Lawrence Lowell as president of Harvard University in 1933.

On 9 May 1933 the director of the Civilian Conservation Corps...