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What caused the dust bowl dbq
What are the three main causes of the dust bowl
What are the three main causes of the dust bowl
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The 1930s was a monumental era and people will never forget the events that took place as millions of acreage was destroyed by a single element of bad weather (“Dust Bowl Facts And summary” n.p.). As many other states were blithely appreciating the warm rain from spring’s hands, Texas was experiencing a hard blow of violent winds. Families lost their crops, houses, lives and their good health when the sandstorm hit, all because of industrialized farming products. This caused many people to acquire respiratory infections and other infections like eye septicity.
Many things led up to the dust storm. The first one was the homestead act of 1862 which stated that a person could get 160 acres of land as long as they lived on it for 5 years. (“Dust
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Bowl Facts and Summary” n.p.). Then there was the Kincaid act which provided free land for farmers to use, and then the Enlarged Homestead act of 1904. These alluring offers tempted families to farm and they left their homes to move west. (“Dust Bowl Facts and Summary” n.p.). Because of these acts, people started to invest in farming equipment to do the job for them. The developers for this equipment made 200,000 tractors for farming but only sold 19,000. This was due mainly to the increase in prices, and farmers realized they could do the work by hand instead of relying on a machine. When the prices of wheat and corn increased and citizens no longer wanted to purchase it from Germany they dug up even more land to plant crops of their own. They stopped using plows, planters, mechanical cultivators and harvesters because it was too expensive to maintain the products and began to work on perfecting the technique by hand (Foner & Garraty n.p)There was such an overproduction of crops the price for grains decreased and people did not make a profit. The land from the crops was soon desolate and there were no roots to hold the soil in place. This combined with offbeat ocean temperatures, which caused there to be no rain, helped shape the dust storms (Fleck n.p.). The first dust storm was November 11, 1933, the wind blew up the loose topsoil into the air, fogging up everything with brown dust.
People thought there would only be one storm, but they were wrong, there would be many more. Many families could not sleep through the storms and when the morning came the bedsheets would be tinted brown. Other times when they went outside the air would be so dark they could not even see their own hands(Jackson n.p.). This dust created a severe problem later, Ron Jackson said that as many as 52% of the hospital patients admitted later who had survived the dust bowl suffered from respiratory dust pneumonia(Jackson n.p.). Caroline Henderson gives us a stark insight into the event, "Now we are facing a fourth year of failure. There can be no wheat for us in 1935 in spite of all our careful and expensive work in preparing the ground, sowing and re-sowing our allocated acreage. Native grass pastures are permanently damaged, in many cases hopelessly ruined, smothered under by drifted sand. Fences are buried under banks of thistles and hard packed earth or undermined by the eroding action of the wind and lying flat on the ground. Less traveled roads are impassable, covered deep under by sand or the finer silt-like loam. Orchards, groves, and hedge-rows cultivated for many years with patient care are dead or dying ... Impossible it seems not to grieve that the work of hands should prove so perishable.(Jackson n.p.).” This dust was around so much, it's
easy to see why people could develop an infection from it. Dust pneumonia occurs when too much dust enters the lungs, the dust can prevent the lungs from carrying out simple tasks and can result in chest pain, fever, shock and trouble breathing (N.Madison, Jenn Walker n.p..). The sad results from breathing in all this dust was the deaths of over 500 people. The drought also left as many as 500,000 people without shelter(Deseret News n.p.). A day that would soon be called “Black Sunday” would be recorded April 15th, 1935 as the longest storm during the dust bowl. Black Sunday was the greatest contributor to deaths during the dust bowl. Some people died from an infection in the lungs, others died from starvation. A Lot of people could not go outside during the storm because of how dark it was.(Deseret News n.p.). This melancholy moment in history brought many people closer together and the memories of this crisis will always be with us. Many people learned that sticking together was all they could do, one learns that nature is not always kind. The dust bowl is a reminder that one can only control so much.
The farmers had torn out millions of miles of prairie grass so that they could farm there. Without the grass, dust began to kick up and storm around the air causing dust storms.
Many believe the Dust Bowl was caused solely by bad weather, but Egan shows a multitude of factors that led to the catastrophe. In Timothy Egan’s book, The Worst Hard Time, Egan believes that the syndicate and government, overproduction of the land, and drought were all factors that caused the Dust Bowl.
When one thinks of serial killers, the first thoughts that come to that person are usually of cold blooded adults. Two young, carefree teenagers almost never come to mind, and most would never even consider the idea. Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate may just change the way people think of serial killers. The young couple rampaged across the state of Nebraska in early 1958, murdering ten people along the way. Most wonder what could cause such young people to turn into murderers with what seemed to be no conscience at all. Did Starkweather have a bad childhood? Bullying could have played a part in causing Charles to turn out the way he was. Caril Fugate became involved with Starkweather at the age of 13 and many questioned if it was possible for someone so young to have played a part in something as awful as murder. As the duo traveled, fear was struck into the public. No one knew why the victims were chosen. Did Starkweather or Fugate have a grudge against them? Were they trying to stop the two, or was it just sheer bad luck? Like most criminals, the pair was caught. They each had very different verdicts. Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate changed the history of Nebraska drastically in just a short amount of time.
He will maintain that the criterion of right interpretation is its own suitability to some present purpose (Carr, 1961, p. 31). A number of prejudices, assumptions, and beliefs contributed to not seeing the bigger picture. The wisdom of the time suggested that the Dust Bowl affected all of Oklahoma. Removing that assumption and looking at the facts, it shows that the affected area was the panhandle of Oklahoma.
Gregory, James N. "Dust Bowl Legacies." University of Washington. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2013.
The Dust Bowl over its time that it occurred affected many things living or nonliving.
2. Basically the Dust Bowl was named for the Great Plain region devastated by drought in 1930s depression-ridden America. Because the drought was struck between 1934 and 1937. It caused the soil was lacking the stronger root systems of grass as an anchor. So the wind can easily pick up the loose topsoil and swirled it into the dust cloud.
Natural conditions contributed to the cause of the Dust Bowl. During the year of 1936, North America was dealt an extreme am...
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 1930 's was a time of despair and devastation, leaving millions in ruins. America was at an all time low during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The stock market had crashed and a severe drought turned into a disastrous storm. The 1930 's effected the nation and nobody knew the answer to the million dollar question, what caused Americas downfall? Historians have tried hard to solve the impossible puzzle and many have their theories, but the exact cause of the Dust Bowl continues to be unknown. At the core of understanding the Dust Bowl is the question of whose fault it was. Was it the result of farmers tilling land beyond what the environment could bear, or is it just a natural fluctuation in the atmosphere. These questions have
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.
(Worster 105). The droughts caused many unfavorable conditions 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 in 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)
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.
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.