Dust Bowl Research Paper

You’re a kid living in the Dust Bowl. “Cough-cough.” You try to force down. Moving your plow back and forth you try to look over the barren wasteland you call home. Wind roaring in your eyes as you see a brown funnel full a dirt and dust less than a mile away. Driving for cover your world fads black. The Dust Bowl was made by a drought and high winds. The drought killed the prairie grass keeping the soil down and the high winds picked it up to make dust storms. The Dust Bowl was harmful to children that affect their education, how they had fun, their health, and spilt families apart.

t was 1931 when farmers from the American Plains were attacked by a silent enemy while still recovering from drought. Many farmers were already trying to recover from the lack of crops sold because of drought and poor soil. After years of continues plowing and planting of wheat with no regard for the healthiness of the soil. Then winds started to pick up and soil started to blow and the brittle wheat fell apart. The dust storms then appeared on the horizon looking like a black blizzard to sweep up the remaining crops and blind livestock.

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

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.

The dust bowl was known as the “Dirty Thirties” because it happened during the 1930s. The dust bowl was a terrible dust storm covering hundreds of miles and affecting thousands of people. Not to mention, also during this time there was the largest most devastating economic crash ever known to America. The dust bowl was both devastating and unbelievably scary for those involved.

Aside from the Great Depression that caused the majority of Americans to fall into the lower class, ecology and military action altered the American class alike. Citizens bore unjustifiable prejudice against fellow citizens and thus divided the nation. Because of this, people were classified into privileged and the unprivileged. The Dust Bowl and the attack on Pearl Harbor assumed a significant role in reshaping social structure in the mid-1900s America, and the resulting burdens from such class differences were substantial.

It was around 1931, we lived in the rural area outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. We were on the brink of becoming homeless. The rent on our rather modest farm house had become three months overdue. We were unable to grow anything in the state the land had been in. I knew with my sister’s condition, we couldn't afford any further complications. My mother and the oldest of my younger brothers took their time to aid my sister with her asthma. My other younger brothers were twins and mainly just ran around playing, since they were too young to truly grasp the misfortune of our ordeal. My Aunt had recently moved in with us as well. She had become too depressed to genuinely help after the death of her husband, caused by an illness from the Dust Bowl. Our

Imagine humongous rolling storms of dust attacking you, blinding your eyes and blowing you off your feet. Gusts of winds in the sky that is blacker than night. Think of endless amounts of dust in your food, drinks, and homes. Insects infested in the walls of your house, crawling under rugs. Visualize people coughing clouds of dust from their lungs.

The economy was not the only thing drying up during the 1930s as a horrific drought took over the Great Plains at the same time. The drought turned the topsoil to loose dust that was carried away with the wind. The resulting dust storms were so large and destructive they made their way all the way to the East Coast. Many of the people in the Midwest were farmers who were left with no way of providing for themselves and without a place to live. This left many of them homeless and in need of government aid. The Dust Bowl was one of the worst disasters in United States history as it displaced millions of people, caused disease, and

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

“The Dust Bowl was both a manmade and natural disaster” (Klein, 2012). “[The catastrophe] revealed the darker side of entrepreneurialism, its tendency to risk long-term social and ecological damage in the pursuit of short-term, private gain, (Worster, “Dust Bowl”). Like stated previously in the Library of Congress article the Dust Bowl was caused primarily by the overgrazing of cattle as well as dry farming by farmers. During the first world war wheat farmers need to fill in the demand of crops for the allied forces in Europe. While this worked for the period of time after the war ended the fields were plowed down to the bare minimum. With no wheat or grass to hold the soil together and nothing to protect the water and

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 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

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

One major cause of that Dust Bowl was severe droughts during the 1930’s. The other cause was capitalism. Over-farming and grazing in order to achieve high profits killed of much of the plain’s grassland and when winds approached, nothing was there to hold the devastated soil on the ground.