My Childhood During The Dust Bowl

During the Dust Bowl many people and kids have suffered, many lost their home and their towns got ruined. One of the people who has suffered in the Dust Bowl is Ashton. When Ashton went to his school he was immediately pulled in by his teacher Mrs. Kam. He was then told that the entire middle east was affected by the Dust Bowl and that a black blizzard will hit very soon. Then the winds outside started to get faster, the windows getting hit by all the dust gathered from the storm, but luckily for the students the school was structured well and was firmly attached to the ground. Many of the students panicked, the teacher trying to comfort them. Ashton was the only one who thought about his family how the black blizzard will affect his

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

The "dirty thirties," as many called it, was a time when the earth ran amok in southern plains for the better part of a decade. This great American tragedy, which was more devastating environmentally as well as economically than anything in America's past or present, painstakingly tested the spirit of the southern plainsmen. The proud folks of the south refused at first to accept government help, optimistically believing that better days were ahead. Some moved out of the plains, running from not only drought but from the new machine-controlled agriculture. As John Steinbeck wrote in the bestseller The Grapes of Wrath, "it was not nature that broke the people-they could handle the drought. It was business farming, seeking a better return on land investments and buying tractors to pursue it, that had broken these people, smashing their identity as natural beings wedded to the land."(pg. 58) The machines, one-crop specialization, non-resident farming, and soil abuse were tangible threats to the American agriculture, but it was the capitalistic economic values behind these land exploitations that drove the plainsmen from their land and created the Dust Bowl.

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

The Dust Bowl affected children in a big way by ruining their health, and causing them to see extricating things. “The children of the Dust Bowl saw things that no one, no matter what their age, should see. And they are as capable as any witness of telling those things with devastating directness.”(Williford) This analyzes that the children had seen things that in today's life, other children could not handle

In the years leading to 1930, the Great Plains experienced a healthy amount of rain. The drought began in 1930 when the rain ceased. That year proved tough for farmers in the Great Plains, but they had no idea what was yet to come. In 1931, dust storms began to sweep through the Great Plains. Behind the dust, families stayed hidden inside their homes using wet clothes and such to guard the window sills and door frames. The families affected by the Dust Bowl were trapped inside of their homes for the six years of raging dust storms. The Great Depression was a number of years that consisted of workers being laid off, no job openings available, and an overall economic low in the United States. The Great Depression, which started in the years leading up to the drought, resulted in poor living conditions, including little to no income, scarce food, and unclean water. The Dust Bowl amplified those conditions for the affected families. (Steinbeck, Lewis, “Dust Bowl”

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 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

In the early 1900s crops for farmers where it was fertile and productive investment, until the climate started to heat up and dry out all of the land. The wind was turning the soil the wrong side up (Egan, p. 114). The High Plains were the most affected, and the wind was the contributing element that made it dangerous for people to live there. In the early 1930s, people were forced out of their homes and had to head somewhere safe. The climate had been dangerous with the wind erosions for a decade or so, and the dust was tearing away the crops, putting dust and other particles in the air, making it thick and hard for people to see when traveling across the country. People were afraid that in the future they would not be able to survive in the High Plains and feel secure that it was a safe place. The Worst Hard Time focused on the Dust Bowl and how it affected people in the High Plains. Parched land was one of the main conditions that lead to despair being found among the people living in the High Plains. Another issue that brought up the theme of despair in the text/book, is the economics of the Dust Bowl. The Great Depression was a major effect leaving many people without their life savings. Lastly, the Dust Bowl coincided with the events leading to Black Sunday, as the winds and the declining economy started to take a toll on people and their homes. In states like Texas and Oklahoma there was dust in people’s eyes, and they were unable to see anything in front of them.

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

In the early 1930s through the 1936, a massive event called the Dust Bowl occurred also known as the Dirty Thirties, dramatically affected areas within Oklahoma, Kansas, and Northern Texas due to extensive windstorms. This event forced numerous people to evacuate their hometowns. The Dust Bowl had a significant impact on society, it caused farmers to have no control of their agriculture because of the dried up land. Once the land dried up there was no way to renovate or replace the soil. This dilemma lead to more citizens to depend on the government for help, financially.

During the dust bowl many people were taking on hardships. Although the New Deal brought relief to some groups it didn’t affect other groups in such a positive way. Other groups had many different ways they experienced The Depression. Groups that were affected included; Southern sharecroppers, Native Americans, business owners, urban blacks, labor unions, women and even more.

I’ve lost everything because of the dust bowl, everything except for my baby and some family members. My baby’s hungry, he’s sick and me too, we all are.

“Surviving the Dust Bowl” is an episode of the T.V. series American Experience, a historical documentary show created by Henry Hampton and Stephen Fitzmeyer. This episode outlines the struggles of living in what became to be known as the Dust Bowl from early to late 1930’s. Devastating droughts had become to affect midwestern and southern plains in 1931, causing many crops to die and large areas of land to become infertile. “Surviving the Dust Bowl” persuades the viewer to experience the perseverance required by southwestern farmers to overcome the unimaginable adversities that they placed upon themselves during the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s. The documentary does this through two main ways. Most of the movie is comprised of black and white footage from that time. This adds a sense of connection, because the clips exemplify how frightening it would have been for the farmers and their families to see huge clouds of black smoke rolling over them, and the fact that it’s on camera helps the viewer connect to it. Over this footage, the directors inlay multiple survivor retellings to show the differences and similarities between families that stayed during the Dust Bowl.

“During WWI, wheat brought record-high prices on the world market, and for the next twenty years farmers turned the region into a vast wheat factory” (OOM pg. 675) This destroyed the native grasses and top soil. When the drought and dust storms hit, tens of millions of acres of rich topsoil blew away. A Denver journalist named the worst region near eastern Colorado the “Dust Bowl”. “Black blizzards of dust a mile and a half high rolled across the landscape, darkening the sky …Dust storms made it difficult to breathe. “Dust pneumonia “and other respiratory infections afflicted thousands (OOM pg. 675). “ The photo “Farmer and Sons in Dust Storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936” by Arthur Rothstein (DAP pg. 269), captures the horror of this disaster. A father and his two small sons cover their eyes from the black air that permeates the photo. They are making their way for cover to a small dilapidated shack the size of a shed. The shack appears to likely provide little protection from the darkness that is filling their lungs. Other than the shack, and the people, the photo shows nothing. The land is barren; there are neither animals nor even roads are shown. The photo leaves us to wonder how they survive, or even if they will. If they were to leave, would they have to do so on foot? With the storms, and the lack of money, they are essentially trapped. Photos like these, as well as literature about the devastation led to national sympathy. FDR tried to address this