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'Woody Guthrie In Dust Bowl Refugee'

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Woody Guthrie was a complicated man. When one compares his legend to the man himself, it is immediately obvious that there were stark contrasts between the Woody Guthrie depicted in his songs, and Woody Guthrie of real life. On one hand, he was a man of the people, fighting for the rights of the poor and destitute. On the other, he was selfish, irresponsible, and in some cases objectively detestable. Woody Guthrie isn’t an anomaly in this regard. Many great artists and musicians weren’t people many would want to spend time around. Jackson Pollock was a wife-beater (Usborne, 2007), Jack Kerouac was a miserable alcoholic, and Charlie Parker was a heroin addict, absentee husband and father. When asked about Bird, Miles Davis said, “If I said something about Bird, you wouldn't believe it… He was a big hog. A pig. No such thing as no with him… I suppose geniuses are like that”(Cook, …show more content…

He, “Takes on the persona of the refugee, putting himself right in the middle of the dust storm or highway” (University of Virginia, 2009). The majority of the song is written in the first person, differing from the classic folk ballad. This serves the purpose of making the song more personal. It is often easier to feel empathy when a voice or a face is attached to it rather than a people at large. However, in doing so Guthrie beautifully depicts the hardships of an entire people, and he is clear in his point that his experience isn’t uncommon. He routinely switches back and forth between “I” and “We” throughout the song. Guthrie highlights the suffering that comes with displacement, but in doing so shows the solidarity and community that comes along with it. “Dust Bowl Refugee” serves two purposes, it brings attention to hardships that were most likely neither fully understood, nor appreciated by those who were unaffected. Simultaneously, it serves to unite a

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He also does a great job of describing how extreme the dust bowl its self was and how it effected people. He also describes the after effects of this large job loss on the people. He talks about a stretch of time from the 1890s to 1940s Thesis: America’s creed of maximization in the form of business farming paired with the drought Was the main cause of the poverty stricken people in the farming industry.

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832 Words | 4 Pages

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

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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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The Dust Bowl, a series of severe dust storms in the the 1930’s, left the the southern plains of the United States as a wasteland. The storms occurred due to the lack of use of dryland farming techniques to prevent wind erosion. Powerful winds would pick up loose soil and carry it around the country side. Called “black blizzard” or “black rollers”, these storms had the potential to black out the sky completely. Due to the inability to grow and sell crops, banks evicted families and foreclosed their properties, leaving them homeless and without an income.

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811 Words | 4 Pages

“ The story highlights a very real and relatable experience about a family driven out of their home due to economic hardship and drought. Also known as “The Dirty Thirties,” the Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms causing major agricultural damage to the American west—especially the Oklahoma panhandle area, Kansas, and northern Texas. Farming methods at the time contributed to the severity of the problem. The arrival of farmers to the Great Plains created conditions for significant soil erosion during naturally occurring periods of cool sea surface water temperatures that regulate precipitation. “ http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/legacy/ 3.

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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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On paragraph 11, in “Letter from the Dust Bowl,” Mrs. Caroline A. Henderson writes to a friend that the dust storms have destroyed their barley, buried mulberry hedges that protected their shelters from north west winds, wiped out pastures, and turned their locust grove into fence posts. Despite these conditions, why did Mrs. Caroline A. Henderson and her husband decide to stay, while the rest of their fellow settlers left? The song “I’d Rather Not Be in Relief” opens with these lines: “We go around all dressed in rags While the rest of the world goes neat,”

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Challenges, we add had this problem trying to get what is blocking your way to sesses or survival. Also with that they need so much determination to do it. With that determination you can do some big things. The articles that are in this essay are Fighting Poverty with Education, Escape from North Korea, And a clip from the documentary The Dust Bowl. In the dust bowl clip people were fighting and was determined to stay alive.

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Timothy Egan wrote this book to describe a hard time during the Dust Bowl. He described how the Dust Bowl affected the farmers and effected life overall. The Dust Bowl occurred during a time of economic depression. He focused on untold stories about people who lived in the Dust Bowl.

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The Dust Bowl by Kevin Burns, is a documentary on what the narrator describes as, “the worst man-made disaster in history” or the severe dust storms that took place in the South in the 1930’s. Burns crafts a non-biased account of the Dust Bowl by providing the viewer with firsthand accounts from people who lived through the Dust Bowl, readings of letters sent during the storms, and in-depth explanations of the events from historians. The documentary begins by showing life in the South before the Dust Bowl and explaining the factors that led to the Dust Bowl. The first description of life before the Dust Bowl follows the life of young woman, Caroline Boa Henderson, who moved to the South to follow her dream of owning her own land.

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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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Who was Woody Guthrie? Woody Guthrie was a singer, songwriter. His guitar sang songs all over the world, “From California to the New York islands.” He also said many great words. He believed that the rich should not “pick on the poor with their money”.

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1291 Words | 6 Pages

“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.

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1183 Words | 5 Pages

Another reality Cooke expresses, being “born by the river in a little tent” (Stanza 1) because he was one of the less fortunate people who was not allowed in a public hospital, born into an unjust circumstance. Back in the time era he lived in black mothers weren’t always treated “equally” and had the “opportunity” to use public hospitals for child birth. These are some of the “travails of adversity” Americans have to deal with that almost diminish their hope for a richer, fuller life. Cooke then changes the tone of the song towards the ending into a more hopeful tone. In his verses, “there was times that I thought I couldn’t last for long but now I think I’m able

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914 Words | 4 Pages

One way that Whitman conveys his poetry is through the eyes of the everyday man. In this period of American history, the civil war was ongoing, and his poetry did not shy away from the everyday

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