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. They had much bigger problems to deal with, and the people today wouldn’t be able to survive it. The biggest problem was the horrible economic situation that Low …show more content…
It is 104 degrees in the shade. The gain fields are all eaten up, so I’m herding the cows along the ditches of the roads. The garden is burned up. We don’t dare carry water to it because the well is going dry and we need all the water there is for us and the livestock. These incredibly harsh conditions ruined and killed everything in its path, including humans. The heat deaths in the country total 1,231. I mean humans. Lord only knows how many animals have died. In April of 1935, Black Sunday hit the Midwest. Living in North Dakota, Low does not discuss this day in her entries, but she does explain how there were a few days of rainfall that gave her father and others hope to start planting a new crop. Giving new faith to these people was a curse from Mother Nature because it wouldn’t stay that way for long. When June came along, the dry weather and heavy dust storms came with it. Low was forced to clean everything in the house, which took the majority of the day. Having these long and stressful working days, Low needed a break, taking some time to go and visit the Badlands. All of the dust storms and blazing heat took tolls on everyone who dealt with
Imogene Glover- Even though Imogene Glover’s story is a bit sad, it is interesting to learn about the way people adapted to the dust bowl. From using telephone poles to drive by, or taking only necessary tools into the cellar, it was neat to see how people dealt with the storms. Melt White- In Melt White 's story, it’s weird to know that many people thought the dust storms and meteor would be the end of the world.
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.
The 1930’s consisted of severe drought and dust storms that prevailed across US plains, creating what is known today as the Dust bowl. This environmental disaster turned soil to dust that winds picked up and spread into dark clouds over the dry regions. Thus, creating suffer endearing conditions for families, their horses, and cattle. In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan describes the affected areas and shares the tragic stories of settlers who lived through this time of suffering. Though this devastation is widely viewed as a horrible climatic event, it is important to understand the human ignorance largely responsible for causing the suffered disaster.
The author, Donald Worster, wrote Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in 1930s to tell not only about the devastating years between 1929 and 1939, but his own recent thoughts on the land and how people interact with it. He talks on the state of the plains today and the scary threat of another dustbowl. He reflects on solutions such as “the Buffalo Commons,” in which antelope, deer, and bison would once again roam freely. This story tells about one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in history that was faced by North America’s Great Plains.
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.
Devastation pervaded the decade of the 1930s, which left many people struggling with hardships. High unemployment and homelessness rate preceded the nation. This destruction became known as the Dust Bowl. During the Dust Bowl, high winds referred to as the black blizzards wreaked havoc on the land. A principal, infamous author, Donald Worster, demonstrates in his book, “Dust Bowl The Southern Plains in the 1930s” the living conditions and obstacles people had faced along with the various explanations for the Dust Bowl.
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.
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…”
Dust Bowl Could you have lived during the time period of the dust bowl? The dust bowl was a hard time for many farmers. The drought made it nearly impossible to grow anything for people to sell or eat. The dust bowl was created by the drought when it struck in 1934-1937.
Losing someone you love can be hard. In the novel, Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse, the main character, Billie Jo, lives motherless through the tragic Dust Bowl. Billie Jo’s responses to hardship contributed to her transformation. Two hardships Billie Jo responded to include her mother passing and her dad drinking. One hardship Billie Jo faced was her ma passing, and that hardship then lead to her avoiding the piano.
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.
They were already in a stock market crash and was in the middle of The Great Depression. It got so dry there wern’t able to grow anything ,so farmers were going through financial problems. Big gust of winds were killing cattle and destroying car engines, it slowly started killing people. While all of this happened people were moving from state to state trying to find jobs, but so were the people who already lived there. People who moved mostly ‘camped out’ because they couldn’t afford to buy a house, also they had to do what they could so their kids would go starving.
At first, thousands jumped at the opportunity for a fresh start with their own land. Soon, those plans went up to smokes even at the end of the blizzard. There were more difficulties such as droughts that appeared in the 1890s (48). People went broke as income went down because corn prices was cut in half in the late 1800s. Over time, families left their homes and a majority of them went back to the urban coast.
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.
“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.