Dust Bowl In American History

Drought, destroying the natural grass, and increased mechanization caused a series of terrible storms lasting almost a decade. The Dust Bowl is so important today because there is a high demand for food and water since more people live here in America. We know not to make to same mistakes that farmers made almost 90 years ago. The Dust Bowl serves as a warning for the future, a warning to keep our lands healthy and always look

The Dust Bowl, battering the Midwest for nearly a decade with high winds, bad farming techniques, and drought, became a pivotal point in American history. The wind storm that seemed relentless beginning in the early 1930’s until its spell ended in 1939, affected the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and the broader agriculture industry. The catastrophic effects of the Dust Bowl took place most prominently around the Great Plains, otherwise known as the farming belt, including states such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, which were hit extraordinarily hard. Millions of farming acres destroyed by poor farming techniques was a major contributor to what is considered to be one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in American history. This period resulted in almost a decade of unstable farming and economic despair. Thousands of families sought government assistance in order to survive. Luckily, government aid to farmers and new agriculture programs that were introduced to help save the nation’s agriculture industry benefited families and helped the Great Plains recover from the Dust Bowl. Furthermore, the poor conditions in the farm belt were also compounded by the Great Depression as it was in full swing as the Dust Bowl began to worsen. In addition, World War I was also underway which caused a high demand for agricultural products, such as wheat, corn, and potatoes to be at its peak, which lured many people to the farm belt with the false expectation that farming

For Dust Bowl residents, life was almost unbearable. The Dust Bowl was given its name after a huge dust storm in 1914 by Robert E. Geiger. The name “Dust Bowl” is very fitting because of the multiple dust storms that blew through the Great Plains during the 1930s. This also shows that everyone viewed the Great Plains as a dusty and treacherous place to live. In addition, “About 40 big storms swept through the Dust Bowl in 1935, with dust often reducing visibility to less than a mile” (Lookingbill 1). This

The Dust Bowl was a difficult time that caused people to lose their lives or to have difficult ones. People got diseases, others lost everything they had, and kids didn’t get to grow up normal. One of these kids was Timothy Johnson. One day, he and his brothers were out when their mom called them in, as she did a loud sound crashed through their trees. They heard the stories of many dust storms forming but Timothy hadn’t known how they would affect his life. They watched as dust clouded around them, they couldn’t even see the tree Timothy and his brothers had played by. Days later after the first storm, Timothy went back to school and talked about it with his friends. A few days later at school another one hit, and all the kids had the realization of what was happening. About 6 months later kids would wear masks and many had gotten illnesses from what was now know as the Dust Bowl. Timothy grew up a lot during the Dust Bowl, he went through many hardships and learned what to do to help out his family. After, he wrote a documentary about it later becoming famous for the perfect way he portrayed it. Yet the story of Tim was only one of many caused by the Dust Bowl, an awful time that destroyed many lives.

The Dust Bowl occurred during The Great Depression in the 1930's. Which was an especially dreadful time for it to happen. Many people were impoverished or were on the brink of poverty. Making the man-made natural disaster all the more devastating.

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

Rays of golden sunlight were piercing the blue sky. Today was a hot day. There had been no rain in the last month. A young child was playing in the field while his father was harvesting the crops. The boy was playing among the newly harvested golden vegetables. There were a lot more vegetables than he remembered from years past. The boy knew they were going to sell most of this harvest. Where are the other plants that he remembered? Why was corn the only thing growing? Why is it in straight lines instead of winding around the property like it normally did? He pondered these questions on the way to school. Today, unlike normal, his teacher let him out of school early. Though he thought nothing of it at the time the sky was turning dark. It

The Dust Bowl was a treacherous storm, which occurred in the years of the 1930’s, which affected the Midwestern people, an example the farmers, which taught us new technologies and methods of farming. John Steinbeck wrote in his novel from 1939 The Grapes of Wrath: "And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, Caravans, carloads, and homeless. Totals of 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, and 200,000 people. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, food, and most of all for land." The early thirties opened with prosperity and growth. At the time the Midwest was full of agricultural

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,

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 1930s, the United States faced various struggles such as The Great Depression- a time in which farmers suffered severely through many challenges. One of the challenges faced by farmers was the Dust Bowl tragedy; a dust storm affecting many farms throughout the midwest. The tragic Dust Bowl was a consequence due to lack of rainfall in the dry prairie lands, decreasing crop growth, and overproduction in farming causing more exposed land. It occurred because of advancements in farming technology, drought in the Great Plains, and the harvesting of grasslands.

The dust bowl was caused by a combination of environmental conditions and use of new farming technology. In Oklahoma during the time of the dust bowl people people decided to leave “until it rains” (Document A: Henderson Letter). This quote implies that drought is the cause for the dust bowl and that the people of the Oklahoma panhandle believed that once the drought ended, the dust bowl would as well. While it does appear that drought is one of the causes of the dust bowl, “farmers and plows on the plains” also played a role in “destroying the delicate ecological balance that had evolved there” (Document D: Historian, Professor David Worster). This quote suggests that it was the use of technology and over farming that ultimately resulted in the dust bowl. In reality there were numerous causes such as “soils

During the 1900’s a lot of devastating events occurred that led to the Dust Bowl. Some of these events were the stock market crash and the Great Depression. Specifically, the 1930’s was a period that held very severe dust storms. The dust storms remained extremely critical for about 6 years; this period of time became known as The Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl had tremendously negative effects on both the people in the region and the land in which the dust storms were located.

Wind and dust rage over your tiny farm house, out in the depths of Oklahoma. You are startled awake, to find piles of dust on the creaky wood floor. You hurry out of bed and prepare for a long day out in the Dust Bowl. The Dust bowls was a disaster that tore apart the United States. The uprooting of soil sent dust and dirt in every direction. Dust traveled through the wind, hundreds of miles over the dry and weak farmland. The Dust bowl was a terrible event that lead to migration to the west, destruction of farmland, devastation of the health of family and cattle, and the creation of the soil conservation service.

The time setting is in the late 1920’s through the early 1930’s. The location setting is in the Midwest to California, in the Dust Bowl. In this area the banks seem to control the lives of the people more than the government. There is a seeming concept of better life in California though it proves to be false with all the migrants taking all jobs.