9th Grade Summer Reading Assignment Analysis

In a lot of cities in the United States in the west especially in states like California there is a small section in that city. That has people from the Midwest that have settled in. In that part of town there are people from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansan that all migrated when the dust bowl was accruing. Or as a lot of people know them by the okies. These people migrated to California during the 1930s when after the country was suffering from the great depression. The great depression had happen after a lot of Europe countries were striating to recover from the First World War. At first those countries were relying on the United State for food, because after the war a lot of those countries were destroyed. So during that time the united state

This is why Lennie isn’t violent. Whenever Lennie does something bad, he suddenly thinks back to George, not being violent, or the fact that he just hurt someone. This shows that he can’t help the things he does, he always needs someone looking after him. One example of this is on page 91, when Curley’s wife starts screaming: “Please don’t do that. George’ll be mad.”

Throughout the novel, Lennie is put to the test against obstacles he has to overcome; he always turns to George for the right answer. Lennie trusts George to make the right decision for him. When Curley was fighting Lennie, Lennie was covering his face with his hand until George screams, “Get ‘im, Lennie” and instantly Lennie puts his hand on Curley and breaks the bones in his hand (Steinbeck 63). Lennie can’t think for himself and never truly means to be mean. Lennie doesn’t know how to control his own body, “He was so little… I was jus’ playin’ with him…an’ he made like he’s gonna bite me…an’ I made like I was gonna smack him… an’…an’ I done it. An’ then he was dead” (Steinbeck 87). In other words, it foreshadows that he is too strong for his own mind and that something potentially worse could happen. Sadly, George made the right decision for Lennie by killing him to prevent future suffering and

In Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe 1880-1930, Mark Wyman argues that many new immigrants that migrated to America from 1880-1930 never intended to make America a permanent residence and many of them returned home to their native countries. He claims that this phenomena is important to the history of American Immigration and is important to the histories of the home land in which the immigrants returned to. In his book, Wyman explores some key ideas such as the reason immigrants decided to voyage to a new land, across the ocean, to what was known as the “land of milk and honey” only to return to their small, and a lot of the time rural village. He also discusses American labor movement and what impact that had on

Lawrence Svobida most likely joined the Dust Bowl exodus, the largest migration in American history. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states; of those, 200,000 moved to California. Arriving in California, the migrants were faced with a life almost as difficult as the one they had left.

In the 1940's the Second Great Migration brought tens of thousands of migrants from Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas to California in search

“As a ‘double whammy’ of drought and depression deepened on the Great Plains, more and more farmers gave up or were forced off of their land” (Winter). According to Bart Robinson, an eyewitness, “Many people thought it was a plague” (Robinson). The migrant workers started moving away. “When pioneers headed west in the late 19th century, many couldn’t resist the lure of the tall grassy land in the semiarid Midwestern and Southern plains of the United States” (“Black Sunday”). Many people did travel to other states. Though “the exact scale of migrants is unknown but it’s estimated that up to 400,000 Southwesterns moved west during the 1930s and to 300,000 moved into California a decade earlier” (Sander). Dust Bowl refugees found roots in California (Winter). “Sometimes they found work, but mostly they found heartbreak and anger” (Robinson). They had once “owned profitable farms. Then they had nothin’ but hunger and dirt and two cents a barrel” (Robinson). Some migrant workers had trouble finding houses within their price range. “Many of the migrant workers lived in labor camps”

Since there were no farming opportunities many people had to find new jobs. Midwesterners began to start to travel farther west to states such as California and Oregon in order to find jobs and escape the dust. These “migrant workers” fled to these western states in the thousands. According to Prentice Hall: The American Nation, these workers were not well received.

While thousands of European immigrants came into the United States on the East Coast, Chinese immigrants arrived on the West coast in smaller numbers. Approximately 200,00 Chinese immigrants arrived between 1851-1883. Beginning in 1910, Chinese immigrants entered the United States through the Angel Island Immigration Station, where they might be detained in barracks for weeks or months. Pull factors for Chinese immigrants included the California Gold Rush in 1848 and jobs working on the construction of the transcontinental railroad (1862-1869) and other railroads in the West. In the later years of this wave of immigration, Chinese immigrants worked as “stoop laborers” in farming, mining and also domestic service such as laundering. Friction

Near the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, over 80,000 Japanese immigrants sailed to America with the dream of a better life. Most of these immigrants entered the United States near Los Angeles. Some worked in the fishing industry; some found jobs in farming, while others worked with the flower and nursery businesses. By the year of 1920 they were able to produce 10 percent of dollar volume of California Agriculture (class lecture).

(Nelson). Thousands of people were moving out from this tragedy from all around the states, weakened, willing to do any type of work for just a meal. An amount of people had put up for sale there belongings that they weren’t able to take with them, most of the migrant workers wished “...to become hired hands on California farms, learning how to grow fruits and vegetables while living on the farms where they worked” (“Dust Bowl Migration”). “The attempts of these displaced agricultural workers to find other work were met with frustration due to a 30 percent unemployment rate” (Fanslow). Several people were heading west, millions of people were leaving from the Midwest in hopes of finding a job in California.

In the 1850’s, Chinese immigrants began entering California in search of gold and the California dream. They had heard that California was the new frontier, a frontier that would provide them with the opportunity for economic riches. Young and ambitious, many of these Chinese immigrants quickly married in their homeland and set out for the gold rush, promising to return (with wealth). Likewise, in the 1880s, when the state of California was undergoing rapid economic transformation, Japanese immigrants — just as young and ambitious as their Chinese counterparts — set out for America where they had heard the streets were “paved with gold.” But little did these Chinese and Japanese immigrants know that what they would discover in California

The economic climate of the Great Depression intensified the effects of the Dust Bowl as many famers were already struggling to repay debts and a loss of profits due to overproduction after World War I. Some farmers were even evicted after they could not repay their debts. Such conditions led to a mass migration of rural farmers to the western regions of the country. Most migrants, referred to derogatively as “Okies”, followed Route 66 to California and other West Coast states. An estimated 2.5 million rural farmers migrated west during the 1930s and most found work as ranch hands or in the agriculture industry. However, these migrants were discriminated against and faced both poor wages and unsanitary living

The progression of immigration began in the late 1870’s because of the yearning to “escape poverty and oppressions in their homeland” (Brinkley 411). For example, Irish immigrants migrated into the United

Many sharecroppers and laborers ventured into cities in search for work. In addition many workers accompanied by their families were unemployed and many moved to California in search for work. Although they found scarce work in California's agriculture fields they soon improved once World War II bargain.