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The great depression 20th century
The great depression 20th century
Introduction over the dust bowl
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The Dust Bowl was also known as the “Dirty Thirties” which took its toll (Dunn n. pag.). The decade from the Dust Bowl was filled with extreme conditions such as tornadoes, floods, droughts, and dirt storms. The Dust Bowl occurred in the midwestern states of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. Within these states the conditions affected many peoples lives. The Dust Bowl had gotten its name after Black Sunday, April 14,1935( Ganzel n. pag.). While traveling through the midwest a reporter named Robert Geige, wrote, “Three little words achingly familiar on a western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the Dust Bowl of the continent- if it rains” (The Drought n. pag.). People back then used the term Dust Bowl to help describe the people that lived in the hard times of the drought stricken region during the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl is still a term we use today to describe the harsh times of the droughts and dirt storms. The Dust Bowl was a harsh time to live in, it affected many things such as: the way people lived and farming.
People had to live off of the possessions they owned and what little money they had or could earn. The determined families had to cling to their homes and way of life. Some of the things they had to endure were the drought, dust, disease and even death for almost a decade. For the families to survive free from dust storms they had to move to California, but only a quarter of the “ Dust Bowlers” did (The Drought n. pag.). People during the Great Depression didn’t really have much so most of the families from the Dust Bowl had to stay at their homes and survive the extreme dust storms.Some people think that it was the hardest to survive as a child.
Children from the Dust Bowl had very tough lives a...
... middle of paper ...
... farmers had to live and make an income.
Works Cited
“A Child’s Life During the Dust Bowl.” Children’s Life During the Dust Bowl. FAQ, 21 Nov. 2013.
Web. 21 Nov. 2013
Dunn, Trey. “The 1930’s Dust Bowl.” trinity.edu. 19 Apr.2005. Web. 21 Nov.
2013
Ganzel, Bill. Wessels Living History Farm. Ganzel Group. 2003. Web. 19 Nov.
2013
“The Drought.”American Experience. PBS, 03 Dec. 2013. Web. 03 Dec. 2013 gbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/dustbowl-drought/> “Welcome to the National Drought Migration Center.” National Drought Migration
Center. University of Nebraska, 21 Nov.2013. Web. 21 Nov. 2013<
http://drought.unl.edu/Home.aspx>
Because if the stock market crashing in 1929, many people sold their stocks and rushed to the banks to retrieve their money. Because of the faulty banking system, many banks failed. This led to the many people who have very little left. A significant thing is the unemployment and the homelessness of the people. In 1929, 3% of the people have unemployment while during the Great Depression, it was around 25% of the people. The farmers of Oklahoma and Kansas was struck the hardest when The Dust Bowl started. The huge dust storms changed the way people lived their lives more than the rest of the US. THe rural farmers in those states are forced to move inward toward the urban areas to escape the harsh conditions of the dust
Gregory, James N. "Dust Bowl Legacies." University of Washington. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2013.
The Dust Bowl hurt many different people in many. And in many different ways negatively affected people who lived there in a personal way. By over its time that it occurred affected many things living or nonliving, many people had to flee because of the Dust Bowls destruction, the Dust Bowl occurred for many reasons, most all our fault and Because of all of what the Dust did to the people it affected them a lot.
The Dust Bowl in the 1930s was a very horrific event in the Southern Plains region of the United States. This was a period of severe windstorms & dust-storms that would blow over hundreds of miles. This stripped the soil of nutrients, and damaged the ecology and agriculture of these American lands. The 2012 drought in the Central Great Plains was a period that lasted only 4 months, through May to August, that eclipsed the record of the Dust Bowl, for the driest period. The Dust Bowl and the 2012 drought compare and contrast in many ways.
The Great Depression, beginning in the last few months of 1929, impacted the vast majority of people nationwide and worldwide. With millions of Americans unemployed and many in danger of losing their homes, they could no longer support their families. Children, if they were lucky, wore torn up ragged clothing to school and those who were not lucky remained without clothes. The food supply was scarce, and bread was the most that families could afford. Households would receive very limited rations of food, or small amounts of money to buy food. This led to the starvation of families, including children. African-americans faced tougher challenges than most during the Depression due to discrimination. The classes hit hardest were middle-class
Steinbeck’s book garnered acclaim both from critics and from the American public. The story struck a chord with the American people because Steinbeck truly captured the angst and heartbreak of those directly impacted by the Dust Bowl disaster. To truly comprehend the havoc the Dust Bowl wreaked, one must first understand how and why the Dust Bowl took place and who it affected the most. The Dust Bowl was the result of a conglomeration of weather, falling crop prices, and government policies. The Dust Bowl, a tragic era lasting from 1930 to 1939, was characterized by blinding dust storms.
The “Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s”, was written by Donald Worster, who admits wanted to write the book for selfish reasons, so that he would have a reason o visit the Southern Plains again. In the book he discusses the events of the “dirty thirties” in the Dust Bowl region and how it affected other areas in America. “Dust Bowl” was a term coined by a journalist and used to describe the area that was in the southern planes in the states of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, between the years of 1931 and 1939. This area experienced massive dust storms, which left dust covering everything in its wake. These dust storms were so severe at times that it made it so that the visibility in the area was so low to where people
The Dust Bowl grazed across the Midwest of the United States, destroying the ecology and agriculture of the United States and Canadian Prairies"1. The Midwest had been experiencing a severe drought when the wind started to collect any loose dry dirt building up gigantic dust clouds. The 1920 's were so prosperous with many new inventions and lifestyles being adapted. Farmers now had the aid of a tractor to help plow the fields faster and farther.2 Was the newly plowed dirt the cause of the Dust Bowl, historian, Professor R. Douglas Hurt seems to think so.
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 to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." The early thirties opened with prosperity and growth. At the time the Midwest was full of agricultural growth. The Panhandle of the Oklahoma and Texas region was marked contrast to the long soup lines of the Eastern United States.
The drought caused a lot of unfavorable conditions for farmers in the southwest. In Worster’s book he says “Few of us want to live in the region now. There is too much wind, dirt, flatness, space, barbed wire, drought, uncertainty, hard work…” (Worster 105). The droughts caused many unfavorable condition throughout the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and neighboring sections of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Thus, roughly one-third of Texas and Oklahoman farmers left their homes and headed to California in search of migrant work. The droughts during the 1930s are a drastically misrepresented factor of the Dust bowl considering “the 1930s droughts were, in the words of a Weather Bureau scientist, the worst in the climatological history of the country.” (Worster 232) Some of the direct effects of the droughts were that many of the farmers’ crops were damaged by deficient rainfall, high temperatures, and high winds, as well as insect infestations and dust storms that accompanied these conditions. What essentially happened was that the soil lacked the stronger root system of grass as an anchor, so the winds easily picked up the loose topsoil and swirled it into dense dust clouds, called “black blizzards.” The constant dry weather caused crops to fail, leaving the plowed fields exposed to wind erosion. The effects of the drought happened so rapidly and progressively over time that
The area of severe wind erosion, soon known as the Dust Bowl, compromised a section of the wheat belt near the intersection of Kansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. ”(Gregory, 11). Along with Gregory, John Steinbeck in his book, The Harvest Gypsies, and Debra Weber in her book, Dark Sweat, White Gold, also write about these events, and in particular the people who were affected by it. The Dust Bowl had ruined any chance of farmers in those regions being able to farm, because of that they were forced to relocate to be able to survive.
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 take all it could from the earth while giving next to nothing back.
In Children of the Dust Bowl, Jerry Stanley reveals an inspiring story to the rise to success for the Oklahoma native children who were affected by the conditions of the Dust Bowl.
During the 1930s, a great depression occurred and farmers had lost crops and profit. The dust bowl affected many people and their living conditions in the states of Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas. This harsh drought lasted from 1934 to 1937 and caused many disappointments in the time being. The dust bowl was a devastating time for farmers and their families, because living conditions were rough, farmers didn't make any profit, and sickness occurred.
To begin with, the “Dust Bowl” was one of the causes of economic fallout which resulted in the Great Depression. Because the “Dust Bowl” destroyed crops which were used to sell and make profit, the government had to give up a lot of money in order to try and help the people and land affected by the “Dust Bowl”. The “Dust Bowl” refers to a time during the 1930’s where the Great Plains region was drastically devastated by drought. All of the areas (Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico) all had little to no rainfall, light soil, and high winds, which were not a very suitable combination. The drought lasted from 1934 to 1937, most of the soil during the drought lacked the better root system of grass.