Essays on Dust Bowl

INTRODUCTION

Many countries rely on agricultural crops for the food security of their citizens and the stability of their economy. Cultivating crops allowed humans to meet their increasing demands for crops and continue to prosper. Without agricultural products, civilizations would have been different or would have failed to exist. People would have relied on gathering crops and end up exhausting every available resource there is. Nevertheless, as societies and their demands for agricultural crops advance, more strain are put into the environment. People have cultivated crops continuously and some have done it without much regards to the environment. There have ...

Dust Bowl is an environmental catastrophe that occurred in the Southern Great Plains of U.S.A. The top soil in the great plains, literally flew away in the wind created a dust cloud in the region. The wind erosion was so intense that it almost smothered human, animal and plant life in the process. Following the incident, the land became a barren landscape and unsuitable for human inhabitation. Farmers and families were forced to leave the land and settle elsewhere as the dust made it difficult to breath. Many agricultural experts blame over cultivation and draining of soil resources as ...

Introduction

It was a unique time in history; slavery had been abolished, Jim Crow las were in effect but the civil rights movement had not yet begun. Voices like Langston Hughes spoke out against the racial oppression. Hughes himself wrote many short stories, poems and plays in his time. One of the themes that repeats itself in the works of Hughes is the word “mulatto”. “Mulatto”, a word used to describe a person of mixed black and white heritage, elicits a negative feeling or response from most people given the prejudiced nature of the word. Due to the negative nature ...

Natural Hazards: Droughts

Drought is a period recorded with less rainfall for a specific region compared to its past rainfall data, which might affect surface water flow, groundwater reserve, crop production and food availability. Impacts of a dry spell vary based on its duration as well as local people’s demand for food and water (National Drought Mitigation Center [NDMC], 2016). If the proportion of vulnerable population exposed to drought conditions were higher, then the impact of drought would also be high even if it lasted only for a short duration. In spite of being a natural hazard, the risk of its ...

“The Worst Hard Time” is a book that tells the story of inhabitants who stayed in the plains during and after the dust bowl. The dust bowl was a period characterized by animal losses and crop failure in several areas (Egan 54). This created a hostile environment for any person to survive although some people decided to persevere. The book takes a keen interest in the people who stayed through and after the tough times by establishing their reason for holding on. It does this through a collection of their experiences and relating them to the terrible events of ...

Dust Bowl in the Great Plains

ABSTRACT The nineteen thirties was the time of great tragedy and crisis in America. Together with the recession that hit its economic fields, an ecological and agricultural problem came next as drought brought the Dust Bowl. It was caused by environmental changes and man-made land degradation. The effects of the Dust Bowl added to the recession and downfall of the American economy, but have resulted to the development of technologies that helped agriculture. It was a remarkable moment for the west as it moulded what it is and where it is in the map of the world today.

INTRODUCTION

The ...

AA: It is really difficult to imagine what the Joad family went through in our own time. We really don’t have anything happening in the twenty-first century that mirrors what they went through. SA: What do you mean? There are people who are homeless and unemployed today. There are also people who get their homes foreclosed by the bank when they can’t pay their loans and they end up having to move out and often have nowhere to go. AA: You’re right, but there are so many more social structures in place to help ...

Book Review: “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl” by Timothy Egan This examination takes a historical interest of the effects of the boom and settlement in the high plains of America. What role did the “American Dream” play in the boom and settlement of the high plains, the creation of the Dust Bowl itself, and the people’s reaction to the Dust Bowl? The discussion explains the situation via the framework of a book review of Timothy Egan’s ‘The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived ...

U.S. Farm Bill and The Dairy Industry For over eight decades American taxpayers have been subsidizing farmers through a series of complex programs, in the U.S Farm Bill (Snap to Health, par. 3). In 1933, during the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt passed a bill that supported farmers who suffered from a surplus of harvests and from the drought effects of the Dust Bowl Till this day, the Farm Bill has consistently remained an active part of the agenda of the United States government. Based on research it seems that there are arguments for both sides, i.e. the one who are ...

Out of the Dust is a 1934 historical fiction novel written by Karen Hesse. The setting of the novel is in a struggling farm in Joyce City in Oklahoma. The novel talks of the challenges faced by Billie Jo a 13 year old girl and her family. It tells of Billie’s struggles as she grows up in Oklahoma Dust Bowl during the depression. Billie’s father was a farmer but his crops failed to nourish because of the drought but Billie was determined to make a better life for herself. Billie was a pianist and got a chance to travel around town with other aspiring ...

Introduction

The Great Depression was a worldwide economic depression that took place in the decade preceding the Second World War. In most nations, it started in the year 1929 to the middle 1940s. This was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression in the 20th century. This tragedy put millions of American citizens out of work, resulting in government involvement in society and the economy.

Cultural and Historical Context

The Great Depression took place at a time when many people had become interested on the stock market. Many others were working in industries and the economy was doing quite well. The local farmers produced enough to ...

John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath during the Great Depression that led to various problems in the United States’ history. The Great Depression lasted from the Black Tuesday’s Stock Market Crash of October 1929 to the Second World War, which got the people working again into the war. During this long time that lasted for about twelve years, a long period of drought and high winds affected a huge part of the American Midwest, which created a phenomenon referred to as the Dust Bowl. Most of the people in the lower Midwest, hoping to find fertile land to settle and ...

The Dust Bowl period that occurred around the drought years of the 1930s in the Great Plains of the United States was an important period in the agricultural history of the West as it caused a lot of implications especially in the agricultural sector and the ways of farming. Viewed from a climatic perspective, the drought experienced during this period is usually considered to have been the worst in the areas around the Great Plains and had serious economic, social and environmental effects of the agricultural aspect of the affected areas. This drought of 1930s is deemed one of the worst ...

The expansions of the US both geographically or environmentally have been contributed by several factors. Amongst the factors that led to the expansion of the US are the 1849 California gold rush and the bowl dust in 1930s. One of the most significant expansions of the US borders westward was the California gold rush. Before the discovery of the gold, the United States was beginning to take shape. With the purchase of Louisiana, the country was stretched all the way to the pacific and the conclusion of the Mexican American war in which California was ceded to the ...

Analysis: Out of the Dust

Abstract Karen Hesse's book Out of the Dust takes an unconventional approach to fiction, depicting the events of a full-length novel in a number of free verse poems. The tale of a family of farmers attempting to survive the Dust Bowl, Hesse's work is fascinating in its minimalism and heartbreaking in its focus. Hesse's free verse prose lends a childlike sense of simplicity and wonder to these heavy themes, showing just how dramatic these conditions can affect a child of that age; the result is an intelligent and thoughtful book on life in the Dust Bowl. Karen Hesse's book Out of the ...

Introduction

Dust Bowl is a phenomenon, which shows how Mother Nature can be rough and devastating. This is the effect of strong wind blowing strongly low on the ground. It has a lot of dusts and dirt that makes it very dark that you could not even see a thing (Burns). Others even think of what they have done why it is happening, as why is it so dark and so strong that it makes their houses shake while inside the horrifying dark bowl of dirt. People did even think that it was the beginning of the end. It was a scare that dusts entered people’ ...

Introduction

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning author from Seattle, Washington. He contributes opinion to the New York Times as the paper’s Pacific Northwest correspondent (Egan). In New York Times, he has written six books, consisting of titles such as “The Good Rain” and “Breaking Blue”. Egan recently accomplished another title to ass into his literary portfolio entitled “The Big Burn”. It comprehensively talks about “The Great Fire of 1910,” which according to history has burned approximately three million acres forestland in the United States. Egan was given recognition by the Washington State Book Awards in 2006 for his ...

The Dust Bowl has been associated with the Midwestern plains, especially the southern part of the country such as in Texas and Oklahoma. The Dust Bowl area suffered black outs from the blowing dust and the loss of good soil in the 1930s. Some of the dust storms were so terrible they were called dust blizzards. The history of that tragic time is chronicled by Donald Worster in his book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, the 25th Anniversary Edition. The book was first published in 1979 and it won the Bancroft Prize that year; a prize which ...