Black Sunday Research Paper

The individuals in the Southern Plains did not acknowledge the dust storms as a threat, and continued to plow up the grass that held the soil together. A book by Donald Worster titled Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, offered vivid descriptions of the effects of dust storms. One example was of a “small town printer [named] Nate White…” who was unable to see and “it was as if someone had put a blindfold over his eyes.” (Doc. A). The citizens in the Southern Plains had experienced the dust storm’s effects but, “ignored the radio warnings, went about their business as usual, and later wondered what had hit them” (Doc. A). In the 1930s, the Great Depression caused the wheat sales to drop due to unemployment in the east. Farmers then

During the 1930’s,a whole decade was full of dust bowl’s which were causing people to lose everything and becoming poor.The plains were where the dust bowls started spreading to countries like Kansas,Oklahoma,Texas and New Mexico.The dust bowls would kill off all the crops and leave areas with drought.people would start moving out of the countries and others would stay.

The dust bowl, was a massive drought that began in 1931 and lasted for 8 years. Farmers, ranchers, and their families suffered more than any group other than the African Americans during the depression. “Black blizzards,” of dirt blew across the landscape and created a new illness known as “dust pneumonia.” Dust storms rolled through the Great Plains, creating huge, chocking clouds that

Did you know that some dust storms could be 10,000 feet high? These are the storms faced by the people in the Southern Plains. During the 1930s, America was hit by the Great Depression. Many Americans lost their jobs and were forced into poverty. The Southern Plains were considered to be hit the worst by the Depression. The plains were cornered by the Depression and the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl, especially, caused agricultural failures, economic failures, and destroyed the fertile lands of the plains. The Dust Bowl was caused by the overuse of soil, dreadful weather and temperature, and the lack of developed farming system.

In the 1930s, there was a period of time known as the Dirty Thirties, or in other words the Dust Bowl. This period of time consisted of severe dust storms that significantly damaged the economy and agriculture of the U.S and Canadian prairies. The many causes of this crisis is one that has been discussed and debated for many years. However, the main cause of this entire debacle is indeed due to the horrendous drought that destroyed everything in sight. In addition, the other causes included overproduction and improper farming by farmers, high heat and winds, and lastly the unfortunate plague of grasshoppers.

One of the most devastating and influential events in American history was the Dust Bowl. This catastrophe occurred in 1930s during the Great Depression. All across the Great Plains, a disaster was formulated by a combination of factors; some of these factors included little to no precipitation, light weight soil, and high wind speeds. Without plant roots holding down the earth, major dust storms or “black blizzards” would sweep through the farming regions blinding and killing cows and destroying any chance of future crop. This resulted in majority of agricultural based families moving.

The documentary, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s by Donald Worster paints a surreal mosaic of life on the Great Plains during the dirty thirties. He does this by illustrating various causations and correlations as well as specific rural towns in the Dust Bowl that exhibit them, and public institutions whose objective was the restoration of the Great Plains to a fertile state as before the coming of the Capitalistic agriculturist that wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. Worster then uses the above as a fulcrum to his main argument, “…there was in fact a close link between the Dust Bowl and the Depression – that the same society produced them both, and for similar reasons. (p.5) He further goes on to explain that the crisis in the Great Plains was primarily caused by man and not nature (Worster, p.13). This was primarily due to the fact that man had never truly lived in equilibrium with the land on the high plains; they exploited the prairies to produce beyond their capacity, thus causing severe environmental breakdown. The fault was not all the agriculturists of course, part of the blame, as Worster points out, is rooted culturally in our capitalistic, industrialized values and ideals. One spokesman stated, “We are producing a product to sell, and that profitability of that product depended on pushing the land as far as it could go.” (Worster, p.57) To fully illuminate the problems at hand, he uses Cimarron County in the Oklahoma panhandle, and Haskell County,

Though most everyone has heard of the Dust Bowl, many people don’t actually know what it is. “When rain stopped falling in the Midwest, farm fields began to dry up” (The Dust Bowl). Much of the nation’s crops couldn’t grow, causing major economic struggle. "The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909” (Dust Bowl). This caused many inexperienced farmers to jump on this easy start of a career. Because of this, farmers in the Midwest had practiced atrocious land management for years. This included over plowing the land and using the same crops year after year. In this way, lots of fertile soil had gotten lost. This helped windstorms gather topsoil from the land, and whip it into huge clouds; dust storms. Hot, dry, and windy, almost the entire middle section of the United States was directly affected. The states affected were South

In the early 1930’s the southern plains was hit with massive winds that brought a significant amount of dust and debris. Homes and peoples belongings were covered with dust. Because the dust was so thick animals and people had a hard time breathing and seeing. The dust bowl was an unsettling time for both farmers and people as they had to learn a new method of living, there only choices were to stay or move away from the dust storm. When looking into what caused the dust bowl, there are many reasons why it occurred. Since the plains was experiencing a drought during the time that the dust bowl occured, the significant amount of harvesting during the drought is the main possible cause of the dust bowl.

The Dust Bowl was a treacherous storm, which occurred in the 1930's, that affected the midwestern people, for example the farmers, and which taught us new technologies and methods of farming. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place

The timeline of the dustbowl characterizes the fall of agriculture during the late 1920s, primarily the area in and surrounding the Great Plains. The Dust Bowl was created by a disruption in the areas natural balance. “With the crops and native vegetation gone, there was nothing to hold the topsoil to the ground” (“Dust Bowl and” 30). Agricultural expansion and dry farming techniques caused mass plowing and allowed little of the land to go fallow. With so little of the deeply rooted grass remaining in the Great Plains, all it took was an extended dry season to make the land grow dry and brittle. When most of the land had been enveloped by the grass dust storms weren’t even a yearly occurrence, but with the exponentiation of exposed land, the winds had the potential to erode entire acres. This manmade natural disaster consumed such a large amount of the South's agriculture that it had repercussions on the national level. The Dust Bowl was a “97-million-acre section

During the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, the United States underwent a series of changes that had a drastic effect on people across the nation. As the economy began to slow to a halt, millions of people were left broke and without jobs. As the country’s farmers were paralyzed with debt, food prices increased radically (McElvaine). During the mid-1930s, a series of droughts coupled with poor agricultural methods led to years of soil erosion and dust storms known as the Dust Bowl, a catastrophe that destroyed farms throughout the Southern Great Plains (Shafer, Low). As a result, many farmers were forced to abandon their land to seek employment elsewhere. These migrant workers, attracted by the fertility and familiarity of the area, traveled to California towns such as Salinas, where they labored tirelessly for wealthy planters (Cayton, Gorn, Williams). The events of the Great Depression Era, following years of difficulty and poverty, paved the way to an entirely new way of life for Americans.

The Dust Bowl was a series of devastating events that occurred in the 1930’s. It affected not only crops, but people, too. Scientists have claimed it to be the worst drought in the United States in 300 years. It all began because of “A combination of a severe water shortage and harsh farming techniques,” said Kimberly Amadeo, an expert in economical analysis. (Amadeo). Because of global warming, less rain occurred, which destroyed crops. The crops, which were the only things holding the soil in place, died, which then caused the wind to carry the soil with it, creating dust storms. (Amadeo). In fact, according to Ken Burns, an American film maker, “Some 850 million tons of topsoil blew away in 1935 alone. "Unless something is done," a government report predicted, "the western plains will be as arid as the Arabian desert." (Burns). According to Cary Nelson, an English professor, fourteen dust storms materialized in 1932, and in 1933, there were 48 dust storms. Dust storms raged on in the Midwest for about a decade, until finally they slowed down, and stopped. Although the dust storms came to a halt, there was still a lot of concern. Thousands of crops were destroyed, and farmers were afraid that the dust storm would happen

As well as the financial aspect of the great depression the many dust storms picked up in the midwest to further took a toll on the american farmers there.These storms picked up dirt and dust and blew into towns suffocating some and burying people's crops and porches.These storms were caused by the many farms that cleared grasses or weeds that held dirt in their roots and wind could pick up the exposed dirt.Since so much land was cleared the storms reached massive sizes and looked like low floating clouds.Many farmers were left with nothing and had to migrate to more urban .The previously very profitable land,had been used for cattle grazing and wheat farming which took a toll on the land and after many years of that it was unrecognizable on the outside as well as depleted nutrients on the inside.(Dust).Many of these displaced farmers took to moving to cities such as California as many people were already going their for the fertile land.Many people broken by the devastating effects of the dust bowl had to migrate to find jobs and the best people can do was to become migrant workers and couldn't settle to find a home because work wasn't always available .As much as 67 percent of small scale farmers had jobs away from from farmlife(Hanes,16).The drought,dust storms, and poor crop yields forced many Americans to urbanize and increased population in California.Farmers produced too many crops after ww1 as none were needed for soildiers making the price drop significantly.In

Since human’s activity, pollution becomes a big problem in the world. There are a lot of part of pollutions include water pollution, light pollution and air pollution. Air pollution is happened in our life. The United States is also a victim of air pollution. In 1943, Los Angeles photochemical smog event occurred. The whole of Los Angeles was covered with smoke. There are about 400 people died and a lot of fruits in orchards began to wither.