Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Poverty in America
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 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
Eight, six, four, two--the Dust Bowl makes them go achoo. The articles “Letters for the Dust Bowl” by Caroline A. Henderson and "The Untold Stories of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl” By Timothy Egan describe the living conditions the civilians had to live through. Numerous people were affected by the living conditions of the Dust Bowl(Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture). First and foremost, the Dust Bowl affected the lives of the people who had to live through it because they were trying to keep the dust out of their houses so they would not get sick. Henderson stated, “Wearing our shade hats, with handkerchiefs tied over our faces and vaseline in our nostrils…”
Snap! As I stepped on the last bit of a wilted cornstalk, I fretted the next harvest hoping it would be better. I barely could support my family, and I can not think about going through this again next year. The Dust Bowl practically killed all my crops, and the crops that were left had no profit. I can just hear my daughter asking again, “Daddy when can we eat something besides bread and corn.”
With little rainfall, soft soil, and crazy winds, The Dust Bowl was held accountable for the death of many. Many housewives during the Dust Bowl years
1 The comparison allows people now to look back on the dust bowl and see how just one force, such as climate can go on to create mistreatment and an impoverished life for workers. Through the connection of this article in addition to Harvest Gypsies we can prevent such events noted from happening
During the Dust Bowl some people made the decision to stay at their farms. Huge drifts of dirt piled up on homesteaders’ doors, came in the cracks of windows and came down from the ceilings. Barnyards and pastures were buried in dirt. After about 850 million tons of topsoil was blown away in 1935 alone. The government responded to this by saying “Unless something is done, the western plains will be as arid as the Arabian desert.”
After a period of time in the Dust Bowl the land was bare and could no longer be used for planting or farming and it was just sand. People’s personal lives were affected dreadfully. “The simplest acts of life — breathing, eating a meal, taking a walk — were no longer simple.”. The Dust Bowl was a eerie era caused by poor farming and a race for money, America hopes it will not happen
An epidemic raged throughout the Plains: they called it dust pneumonia.” Everybody was dying, even
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].
For example, Caroline Bird says, “In Harlan County where whole towns whose people had not a cent of income. They lived on dandelions and blackberries. Children were reported so famished they were chewing up their own hands. Miners tried to plant vegetables, but they were often so hungry that they ate them before they were ripe”( Document 2). This shows the reality of how much these families struggled to stay alive, no matter how arduous it was to get through the day the families managed to keep their ambitions high in hope for better times.
African American families during that time are often being torned apart with the women of the household widowed because the husbands were murdered. An example of such cases is Joe Johnson’s wife, where “white men saw him and shot him and he died and leaves [the wife], a poor widow with a housefull of children, and no one
Since 1931 when James Truslow Adams first created the phrase “the American Dream”, people believed that America continuously offered everyone an equal opportunity to be successful. John Steinbeck’s novella, Of Mice and Men, was set during the Great Depression. Farms were struck hard during the Depression, and the two main characters George and Lennie were farm hands during this time. They had experienced the misunderstandings of other farm hands in terms of Lennie’s mental disability, but they were trying to earn enough money to buy their own farm. The idea of this farm drove Lennie and George to keep working, and like many others during this time they hoped to achieve this dream.
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.”
The setting mainly took place in south of Soledad, California, near the Salinas Valley, during the Great Depression in the 1930’s. Salinas Valley had many substantial farms during the Depression. This was essential because colossal farms employed a massive number of workers, often up to hundreds. Since farm workers with no steady employment, would often head to these communities, it was logical that Salinas Valley was George and Lennie’s destination. Migrant farm workers were perfect examples, to highlight the solitude and loneliness engendered by the Depression. These men had no place to call home, and had only a few belongings to call their own.