In out of the Dust by Karen Hesse, Billie Jo is my favorite character because of the optimism she maintains to have while she struggles to survive a harsh life. Having grown up in the bleak area of the Oklahoma Panhandle, during the great depression, Billie Jo and her family encounter many economical problems. Near the middle of the story, Billie Jo’s father is thinking about quitting farming because of the drought and the severe dust storm, which unfortunately tears apart all of his crops. Billie Jo assures her father, “‘The farm won’t fail,’ I tell him.
Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains in the 30’s written by Donald Worster and published in 1979, is an informative text on the Great Plains during the Great Depression. Donald Worster is a credible author because he not only earned a Ph.D. from Yale in environmental history, but he also had previously written a book on the environment and the economy. This book was written well and Worster did a good job of revealing how people and how they live have effected the areas environment. He spoke of places including, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas and many more.
The very first sentence of the chapter makes me believe that the setting is obviously in Oklahoma and a little while after the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. It makes me believe that because of the way that the narrator writes and him/her calling it “the red country and part of the gray country,” which is referencing the red, white, and gray sand often associated with the state. Later on in the first page, the narrator begins to describe a drought taking place. Perhaps the drought will last a long time and lead to the narrator and his/her family moving somewhere more viable. On the second page, the narrator describes “wheels” milling the ground, which leads me to believe that he/she lives
The dust bowl was considered the “Worst hard time” in american history. The Dust Bowl was a big cloud of dust that took place during the 1930’s in the middle of the Great Depression. The dust bowl was located in the southern great plains as it affected states like Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. The three main causes of the Dust Bowl were drought (Doc E), amount of land being harvest (Doc D), and the death shortgrass prairie (Doc C).
The Dust Bowl was a terrible experience during a horrible time. In the 1930s post World War I America had a total collapse of the stock market causing the Great Depression affecting the economy on a global scale, but hitting hardest at home in the United States. However, the economy wasn’t the only thing that was hit hard during this time; seemingly unstoppable dust storms ravaged farming land from the west to east coast hitting hardest in the great plains in the middle section the the US became known as the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl was not entirely a causation of bad luck on nature, it was caused by an increasing demand for crops, advancements in farming technology, while the final nail in the coffin was a lack of rain. During World War
Out of the Dust takes place in 1934, in Joyce City, Oklahoma. The book is about a girl named Billie Jo Kelby and her life struggles during the Oklahoma Panhandle and The Great Depression. The Oklahoma Panhandle, or the Dust Bowl, is a series of dust storms that happened to Texas and Oklahoma in the 1930’s. The dust storms took away water and made it hard for people to farm and grow crops.
The book is wonderful source for accurate historical view of the time. During one of Scouts average 2nd grade school day, a fellow student Named Walter Cunningham, Son of a poor farmer being offered money for lunch from his teacher. “Miss Caroline went to her desk and opened her purse. “Here’s a quarter,” she said to walter. “Go and eat down-town today.
The Dust Bowl Diary by Ann Marie Low is an incredible piece of documentation about the struggles and hardships that were faced during the infamous Dust Bowl. In this diary, Low dives deep into many different subjects of struggle and change, and it is truly fascinating. In today's society, people take everything for granted. The survivors and witnesses of these horrible years are people that everyone should look up to as an example. In our world, eating the same food, or sleeping in an uncomfortable way is unbearable, but those problems were the least of the concerns of these people.
His argument is that the farmers in the Southern Plains are more concerned with turning a profit than the land or what they are doing to it. According to Worster, these farmers only view the land as only having commercial value. By only seeing the land as having monetary value, the farmers of the Southern Plains continued to exploit the land and its resources. This over farming is a result of a capitalist need to cultivate the earth in order to achieve a maximum profit. Worster hints that capitalism is the root of all the problems during the Dust Bowl and is often mentioned throughout the book.
Through the completion of this project, my knowledge of the dustbowl has considerably expanded. I have learned about the dustbowl through textbook and lectures in class; however, this project has taught me the most about the dustbowl than any other source of information. This project improved my understanding of the dustbowl due to the fact that we used primary sources for our information. Primary sources allow us to get first-hand experience for any event and an actual account as to what happened. Although secondary sources helped my understanding of the dustbowl, primary sources gave me an actual representation of what occurred during the dustbowl through the use of providing interviews, photographs, and articles during the period of the dustbowl.
Dust Bowl and Economics of the 1930s The Dust Bowl was a very desperate and troublesome time for America. The southwestern territories were in turmoil due to the arid effect of the drought causing no fertile soils. As the rest of America was being dragged along with the stock market crash and higher prices of wheat and crops since the producing areas couldn't produce. This was a streak of bad luck for the Americans as they were in a deep despair for a quite some time.
The story starts off by telling you to imagine what it’d be like to live in the 1930’s when the Dust Bowl had taken effect. When dust storms came everyone in the area had to prepare quickly to withstand them. The wind combined with the dust and gravelly dirt was very strong and loud, easily getting into houses and cutting off fresh oxygen. Dust storms of the 1930’s were supposedly one of the worst natural disasters. They had affected everyone and everything in the area, so many Migrated West.
The dust bowl is very serious. “But in the summer of 1931, the rains disappeared. Crops withered and died. There had always been strong winds and dust on the Plains, but now over plowing created conditions for disaster. There was dust everywhere, because the people couldve worried about others than themselves.
“With the gales came the dust. Sometimes it was so thick that it completely hid the sun. Visibility ranged from nothing to fifty feet, the former when the eyes were filled with dirt which could not be avoided, even with goggles ”( Richardson 59). The Dust Bowl was a huge dust storm in the 1930s that stretched from western Kansas to New Mexico. People that lived in that area could not step outside or they would get dust in their lungs.
The Dust Bowl, beginning in the 1930s, added to the struggle of American farmers as lands out west in states such as Oklahoma and Kansas were over-plowed, causing the topsoil to become uprooted, creating massive dust storms. These dust storms left the land unusable to farm, displacing many Americans in the agricultural industry. Steinbeck’s The Harvest Gypsies displays the struggles these farmers faced when moving west to California, hoping to find some sort of work. Many displaced farmers lived in squatters’ camps, temporary dwellings for those looking for work. Steinbeck described these camps as having awful living conditions, saying that “From a distance it looks like a city dump, and well it may, for the city dumps are the sources for the material of which it is built.”