Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
Literature poverty essay
Farmers in the 1800s
Farmers in the 1800s
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Literature poverty essay
Farmers in the 1800s
Farmers in the 1800s
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
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.
In the book, The Worst Hard Times, author Timothy Egan explains the hard times that the families in the high plains experienced during the years near the Great Depression. Egan writes about "The Great American Dust Bowl" which originally was a place of lushes thick grass where the bison could graze and where the Indians in the area could hunt, until Texas cowboys took over the land for big cattle drives making the area a huge ranch. During the years that these cowboys worked the land, they noticed that before they started the cattle runs, the grass that was in the area kept the top soil in place on times of drought. Now that the cattle had been grazing and the cowboys had been working the area, the grass was not prospering creating huge dust storms when the wind blew and there was no rain or plants to keep it down. The dust storms posed a worry to the ranch owners that they would lose cattle and therefore lose profit that they decided to divide up and sell the world's biggest cattle
The tone of chapter 11 in John Steinbeck's, “The Grapes of Wrath,” is sympathetic, sad and hopeless. His word choice and syntax show how the sad houses were left to decay in the weather. His use of descriptive words paints a picture in the reader's mind. As each paragraph unfolds, new details come to life and adds to the imagery. While it may seem unimportant, this intercalary chapter shows how the effects of the great depression affected common households.
Jefferson vs Hamilton’s Inspiration and Beliefs The Federalist ideas of Alexander Hamilton influenced the future Democratic Republic government, created by Thomas Jeffferson as president, by finding the money management used by America and the beliefs behind negotiation and centralized government. During the late 1700s, Hamilton became the secretary of state and created the plan to bring America out of its debt. As a federalist, many of his ideals included the elastic, or necessary and proper, clause and giving more power to the government, as this affected his plans of taxation, banking, and constitutionality in certain decisions made by the government. These Hamilton inspired ideas changed America’s perspective on nationalism and power of
The interview of LeRoy Hankel, who was a farmer during the dustbowl, really stood out to me because his words painted an image in my head. In his interview, Hankel recalls his time on the farm during the dust storm by saying that “it was just a cloud coming right over, that’s what it looked like. And it was all black.”
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.
John Steinbeck, in the novel, Grapes of Wrath, identifies the hardships and struggle to portray the positive aspects of the human spirit amongst the struggle of the migrant farmers and the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Steinbeck supports his defense by providing the reader with imagery, symbolism and intense biblical allusions. The author’s purpose is to illustrate the migrant farmers in order to fully exploit their positive aspects in the midst of hardships. Steinbeck writes in a passionate tone for an audience that requires further understanding of the situation.
Within a decade, the farmer have been through the hopeful moments of prosperity and the hopeless times of hunger. Other migrating families kept traveling to find jobs. The leading historian of the Dust Bowl, Donald Worster, described it in the following way: “In no other instance was there greater or more sustained damage to the American land, and there have been few times when so much tragedy was visited on its inhabitants. Not even the Depression was more devastating, economically” [2].
Intercalary Chapter Literary Analysis During the Great Depression, the nation as a whole was stripped of financial security and forced into a survivalist way of living. This changed the ways that people interacted with one another and the overall mentality of society. In the Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family is torn from their land and find themselves with nothing, a common story for migrant farmers of that time, derogatorily called “Okies” by Californians. But this is not the only group that is struggling, the entire county was in a state of panic and bruteness, no matter how “well off” they seemed to be.
The FDR speech paints them in a more innocent light as victims to a cruel world while the informative text puts the blame on the farmers for using horrible land techniques. “The Dust Bowl” state “. They made two big mistakes. First, in order to plant as much wheat as possible, they plowed over all of the natural prairie grasses that kept the topsoil2 in place. Second, they planted crops too often, instead of giving the soil a break every now and then.
In this event, Howard is looking upon the farm-scene that he has been away from for so long with its “endless drudgeries.” With this, all of the joy of Howard’s homecoming disappeared. Among this farm-scene was Howard’s farmer brother, Grant, who was angry at Howard for his elegant clothes and clean hands. In conclusion, Howard comes home from his successful career and is struck with feelings of tension and overwhelmed by the farm life that he has been away from for so long.
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.”
It’s hard to get through a day during the great depression. Everyday, my family worries about my father's job. Now there's one more thing to add to the pile of worries. The dust bowl. The storms have been going on for about 3 years now.
In the context, what the Joads suffer the most not is not from physical environment and the dustbowl, but from the businessmen, who are not concerned at all about the livelihood of the farmers but their self-earnings. They banish the farmers off their land, their root, where they have been dwelling for generations. Furthermore, the California landowners, who are fully aware that the farmers need to survive, continue to lower the wages and to spread falsehood that California was a thriving place, leading more people to migrate to California. The modern men of industry manipulate the society as they intend, while living detached from the farmers and dehumanize them.
The Robber Barons forced the workers to live in a town that the Robber Barons built, and they couldn’t leave. The reason they could not leave was because, when the workers came to the town they did not have very much money. The Robber Barons offered to buy them the house, but the worker would have to work in their factory, and pay them back. This means that the worker could not leave their job until they paid back the Robber Baron which took a very long time. Also within the factory there were many issues.