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Summary Of Donald Worster's Dust Bowl

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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 use of pictures was a huge help in making the book more interesting and they showed what it was like during the 1930’s. One aspect of the book that was exclusively charming was that at the beginning of each part there was a specific quote about the next section. One of the quotes was from a sign in a storefront window in the Great Plains at the time. His text was hard to follow at times, but over all, the sentences were clear and precise. There are many photos in the book that helped the readers be able to actually see what that time …show more content…

The beginning of the book was a much easier read than the end, only because most of the information was given in the beginning and the end seemed to reiterate what had already been said. The book was hard to finish because it seemed to be saying the same thing every page towards the end. Worster’s arguments were solid and made a lot of sense comparing culture to the economy and the New Deal. Linking the Dust Bowl with the Great Depression made this more entertaining. His thesis, that the Dust Bowl was a consequence due to the inherit conflict between capitalist expansionism and the ecological sensitivity was a valid and accurate statement that he explained thoroughly through out the entire text sufficiently. Donald Worster did a great job of finding a problem, analyzing it, and giving

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The setting of this book is in Oklahoma. The location of this “Dust Bowl” is accurate because in the nineteen thirties-nineteen forties, Oklahoma did go through four terrible droughts that led up to this “Dust Bowl” event. The “Dust Bowl” event led to terrible destruction. It also led to death in some cases. And it was overall a terrible event that occurred in Oklahoma.

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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).

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In The Worst Hard Time (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Timothy Egan tells the stories of the people who survived the Dust Bowl. Dust storms swept across Americas High Plains during The Depression and many fled but Egan tells the stories of those who stayed and survived. Egan believes that the time that dust storms were happening was the literal “worst hard time”. Egan also believes that the dust storms played a large role in The Great Depression and that it was like nothing ever seen before. Egan shows how the dust storms were a great human and ecological disaster.

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The book “The Worst Hard Time” by Timothy Egan gives an in-depth perspective on the survivors of the Dust Bowl. Timothy Egan is a journalist and has authored other historical novels, including “The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America.” Egan wanted to show what the Dust Bowl was like for the people that lived in the Great Plains when it occurred. I chose this book because I have always been interested in the Great Depression and the events around and during it. “The Worst Hard Time” is a slightly biased, thorough retelling of the lives of people living through the Dust Bowl.

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A good theme is the dust bowl. Because the book talks about it a lot and the depression the people went through and what they did to survive the tactics of how and what they did to get the land back to be able to farm the land again. The book does a good job of showing the struggle that the people in the southern plains had to face in 1930 – 1936. Its show how the government tried to help people by giving the farmers and people that wanted to work bulldozers to turn the land. To try and get the bottom soil on top and the soil that turn to sand on the bottom in hope that the sand like soil would turn back into the rich dirt that it was before.

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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.

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Donald Worster is an environmental historian and his book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s helped to define the environmental history movement as it was the first environmental history book published. He breaks the stereotype of how the Dust Bowl was viewed by writing it from an environmental standpoint instead of writing a social history by focusing solely on the people and their experiences. How it helped to define the environmental history movement is that it opened up this avenue for others to write about environmental issues. He is also an anti-capitalist and this book combines his interest in the environment with the effect that capitalism has on the environment.

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The Dust Bowl was a very pro-founding topic in American history. It was a period of severe dust storms that occurred in the American Great Plains during the years 1930-1936. Donald Worster wrote a scholarly book, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, that reflects on the drastic effects of the event. Worster also offers his reasoning as to why the Dust Bowl happened. He claims, “The dust bowl was the darkest moment in the 20th century life of the southern plains...

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Did you know there was a major catastrophe in United States history that no one knows that much about. This horrible event had many names, but the most recognizable one may be the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl was a dark moment in America’s history that brought on disease, destruction, loss of jobs, and overall tragedy. The Dust Bowl’s origins, reasons for happening, affect on the people of the 1930s, its relief efforts, and how it has affected America today will be explored.

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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.

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“The Dust Storm Black Sunday” elucidates descriptive importance and affects of the Dust Bowl in the early 20th century. The authors provide some insight into the concept of what is causing the disastrous dust storms, taking a serious approach to the realities of people exposing to the Dust. Families living in the south struggle to survive in a harsh condition; with limited resources and health problems, so much damage was done to the land that drought hit the area and there was nothing anyone could do to stop the disaster. After the drought ended by the 1940s a wide range of migration took place in the south that led people to migrate to California. This information led into deeper understanding and further knowledge about the Dust bowl and

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The Dust Bowl was both natural and human disaster, which some of it provoked by human activities. In the 1920’s the weather was favorable with plentiful of rain and technology such as tractors. This helped Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and Colorado’s great plains. Yet, farmers gave little consideration of the prairie grass that secured the topsoil. The topsoil was a great source for crops to grow.

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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.

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The Dust Bowl of the 1930’s was the worst dust storm of them all and there’s many reasons why. First, when a dust storm happened it was very scary. The kid inside of the first paragraph was shouting to his parents that a dust storm was happening and he was showing his fear by his tone because he was yelling. Second, in a situation where a dust storm was happening the family put wet towels at the windows and doors to prevent sand from coming in but it was getting in anyways. Third, the dust storms were destroying the land, making the soil not suitable for farming, they ruined the economy and threatened lives of people.

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Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s was an attempt to dismantle the prevailing interpretation of the event, recasting it from environmental to economic in origin. Marxist in his interpretation, but not in his definition of capitalism, Worster argued that the Dust Bowl “was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth.” (Worster, 4) To Worster, the dust storms that ravaged the region were a direct result of imported agricultural practices; particularly, the plowing up of millions of acres of sod for the purpose of sowing wheat. This was not, however, the inevitable outcome that Worster was referring to. Instead, he interprets the string of events as a byproduct of the nation’s dependence and allegiance to a specific form of capitalism, one which demanded aggressive expansion and ever-increasing annual yields.

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