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Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl was the result of a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s. The phenomenon was caused by a combination of natural factors (severe drought) and human-made factors: a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent wind erosion, most notably the destruction of the natural topsoil by settlers in the region.[1][2] The drought came in three waves: 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940, but some regions of the High Plains experienced drought conditions for as long as eight years.[3]

For other uses, see Dust Bowl (disambiguation).

The Dust Bowl has been the subject of many cultural works, including John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, the folk music of Woody Guthrie, and Dorothea Lange's photographs depicting the conditions of migrants, particularly Migrant Mother, taken in 1936.

Changes in agriculture and population on the Plains

Agricultural land and revenue boomed during World War I, but fell during the Great Depression and the 1930s.[65] The agricultural land most affected by the Dust Bowl was 16 million acres (6.5 million hectares) of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. These 20 counties that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service identified as the worst wind-eroded region were home to the majority of the Great Plains migrants during the Dust Bowl.[39]


While migration from and between the Southern Great Plain States was greater than migration in other regions in the 1930s, the numbers of migrants from these areas had only slightly increased from the 1920s. The Dust Bowl and Great Depression thus did not trigger a mass exodus of southern migrants, but simply encouraged these migrants to keep moving where in other areas the Great Depression limited mobility due to economic issues, decreasing migration. While the population of the Great Plains did fall during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, the drop was not caused by extreme numbers of migrants leaving the Great Plains but by of a lack of migrants moving from outside the Great Plains into the region.[39]

1936 North American heat wave

Desertification

– semiarid area of Australia

Goyder's Line

Global warming

List of environmental disasters

Monoculture

Ogallala Aquifer

– semiarid area of Canada

Palliser's Triangle

Semi-arid climate

Tragedy of the commons

– notable Dust Bowl migration route to California

U.S. Route 66

– simultaneous program to prevent overgrazing and erosion

Navajo Livestock Reduction

1936 – – 25 minutes, directed by Pare Lorentz

The Plow That Broke the Plains

1998 – – 52 minutes, season 10 episode of American Experience documentary tv series

Surviving the Dust Bowl

2012 – – 240 minutes, 4 episodes, directed by Ken Burns

The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl photo collection

a PBS television series by filmmaker Ken Burns

"The Dust Bowl"

(EH.Net Encyclopedia)

The Dust Bowl

Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, Dodge City, KS

Library of Congress, American Folklife Center Online collection of archival sound recordings, photographs, and manuscripts

Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940–1941

The Dust Bowl (Wessels Living History Farm)

Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture – Dust Bowl

Oklahoma Oral History Research Program

Dust, Drought, and Dreams Gone Dry: Oklahoma Women in the Dust Bowl Oral History Project

First person interview conducted on November 30, 2011 with Frosty Troy talking about the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. Original audio and transcript archived with Voices of Oklahoma oral history project.

Voices of Oklahoma interview with Frosty Troy.

playlist on YouTube

Dust Bowl – Ken Burns

playlist on YouTube

Dust Bowl – Ken Burns