High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Long Depression was a worldwide economic recession, beginning in 1873 and running through the spring of 1879. It was the most severe in Europe and the United States, which had been experiencing strong economic growth fueled by the Second Industrial Revolution in the decade following the American Civil War. At the time, the episode was labeled the Great Depression and held that designation until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Though a period of general deflation and low growth, it did not have the severe economic retrogression of the Great Depression.