Cultivating historical imagination in undergraduate students is often a difficult task. The distance between their lives, generally lived in the last quarter century, and the ways in which people lived i the pre-World War II period can be enormous. The task becomes even more difficult when students think that certain elements of their lives in the present are much more similar to those of previous eras than they actually are. Case in point is the Great Depression. Given the current economic downturn, many students are convinced that, in some ways, they are living in a situation akin to that of the 1930s.