Ben Bernanke explains his fascination with the Great Depression in the preface of his book:
Essays on the Great Depression.

“I have enjoyed studying the Great Depression because it is a fascinating event at at a pviotal time in modern history. How convenient for me, then, professionally speaking, that there is also so much to learn from the Depression about the workings of the economomy. (those who doubt that there is much connection between the economy of the 1930s and the supercharged, information-age economy of the twenty-first century are invited to look at the curreent economic headlines—about high unemployment, failing banks, volatile financial markets, currency crises, and even deflation. The issues raised by the Depression, and its lessons, are still relevant today.)”

“History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite…. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.” - Stephen Fry, “The future’s in the past”