Dust Bowl Research Paper

To keep the Great Plains residents healthy, “The Red Cross opened six emergency hospitals to deal with the crisis” (Brown 37). This shows that the Dust Bowl crisis got so bad that organizations like the Red Cross enlisted to help the Dust Bowl residents get back on their feet and become happy and healthy once again. To help with the situation, “The federal government developed programs to aid Dust Bowl residents” get back on their feet. This reveals that everyone had to join in the help get the Great Plains get back to its former glory and ability to produce crops. This also shows that the federal government was working to help prevent a disaster this big from occurring again. Finally “The long dry spell ended in the autumn of 1939. Rain drenched the plains for the two days and nights” (Heinrichs 39). This is important because nature finally ran its course and nourished the water-deprived soil. This shows that the long-awaited end to the Dust Bowl and drought had finally ended, bringing hope to not only Dust Bowl residents but all of the United States. The Dust Bowl, an event that caused so much destruction to the Great Plains and the American economy, was finally

The Dust Bowl was "the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains," (pg. 4) as described by Donald Worster in his book "The Dust Bowl." It was a time of drought, famine, and poverty that existed in the 1930's. It's cause, as Worster presents in a very thorough manner, was a chain of events that was perpetuated by the basic capitalistic society's "need" for expansion and consumption. Considered by some as one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of man, Worster argues that the Dust Bowl was created not by nature's work, but by an American culture that was working exactly the way it was planned. In essence, the Dust Bowl was the effect of a society, which deliberately set out to

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.

According to answers.com, a dust bowl is a region reduced to aridity by drought and dust storms. The best-known dust bowl is doubtless the one that hit the United States between 1933 and 1939.

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.

During the Great Depression farmers had to produce more wheat in order to turn a profit. They expanded their fields, and dug up natural drought resistant grasses, leaving the top soil vulnerable to wind erosion. Plow based farming also played a big role in making the top soil vulnerable to wind erosion. The severe drought taking place at the same time made things worse. Wind kicked up

“We watched as the storm swallowed the light. The sky turned from blue to black, night descended in an instant and the dust was on us…Dust lay two feet deep in ripply waves across the parlor floor, dust blanketed the cookstove, the icebox, the kitchen chairs, everything deep in dust.” -Karen Hesse’s Diary, April, 1935 (Dust Bowl Diary Entries). In the 1930s, a phenomenon called the Dust Bowl swept the people of the Great Plains off their feet. This paper defines the Dust Bowl and its impact on the US economy and American citizens.

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

The 1930s are a decade marked by devastation; the nation was in an economic crisis, millions of people were going hungry, and jobless. America was going through some dark times. But if you were living in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas (or any of those surrounding states) you had bigger things on your mind than being denied the money in your bank account. From 1935-1939 Winds and dust storms had left a good portion of our country desolate; however our author takes a slightly different, though no less valid, opinion on the matter. In his book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s Donald Worster blames mans inappropriate interference with nature that allowed these massive storms of dust that happen. "My

In what was one of the most fertile areas of the United States, one of the Nation’s worst agricultural disasters occurred. No rain came so crops did not grow, leaving the soil exposed to the high winds that hit the area in the 1930s. Stretching over a 150,000 square mile area and encompassing parts of five states—these being Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico—the Dust Bowl was a time where over 100 million acres of topsoil were stripped from fertile fields leaving nothing but barren lands and piles of dust everywhere (Ganzel). While things were done to alleviate the problem, one must question whether or not anyone has learned from this disaster. If not, one must look into the possibility that the United States may be struck

Farmers were affected by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. “Much of the Roaring '20s was a continual cycle of debt for the American farmer, stemming from falling farm prices and the need to purchase expensive machinery.” (UShistory.org). The farmers were struggling with money and affording the tools needed to grow a crop. The farming way of life was slowly fading away. During the era of the Dust Bowl, there was a major drought, so farmers struggled with maintaining enough water for their crops to grow.

On April 8, 1935 the FDA finally approved the Emergency Relief Act, which provided $525 million for drought relief, and approves creation of the Works Progress Administration; this will employ 8.5 million people. So many families were left broke and lost homes due to the drought and the inability to produce crops to sell for livelihood.

The Dustbowl lasted many years and many U.S. countries are suffered its consequences. Many crops were damaged from low amounts of rain, high winds and many insect infestations. Dust storms whirled through the country and tore everything to pieces. This agricultural recession contributed to many bank closures, loss of employment and even business loss. People in these areas also faced many emotional and even physical misfortunes. Water shortages were also widespread affecting many people. These shortages didn’t just impact humans, animals and plant life was also harmed.

All through in the 1930s, eastern Colorado alongside most of the Southern Plains states, experienced outrageous dry seasons. Baca County was among the regions hardest hit, close to the focal point of what was named the Dust Bowl. Southeastern Colorado got just 126 aggregate creeps of dampness for every one of the years somewhere around 1930 and 1939. This was 205 inches not exactly the earlier decade, and well beneath the 18 inches yearly expected to develop wheat. No rain implied no products, and no yields implied no insurance for the dirt when the spring winds arrived.