Ask The Dust Analysis

During the Great Depression a Midwestern phenomenon called the Dust Bowl affected many lives of newly settled Americans throughout the Great Plains region. Otherwise known as the “Dirty Thirties”, a storm of dry weather caused farmers and villagers to abandon their homes in hope to survive the deadly threat of the storm. The Dust Bowl was a big contributing factor to the Great Depression agriculturally, and economically.

The Great Depression was a time of economic crisis around the world from the time period 1929 to World War II. To help capture the feeling in this period, John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath. The main plot of of the story is about the Joads, a farming family forced from their home sent to search for work in California. Steinbeck includes a series of intercalary chapters to help paint a picture of migrant workers and the challenges they faced. In chapter 9, Steinbeck explores the emotional trials the tenants forced to endure when they are required to leave their homes and their lives, this chapter is an appeal to pathos. To convey pathos Steinbeck employs syntax and dreary diction to obtain an emotional response from the reader.

Urban centers had turned into uninhabited areas. Grim shantytowns, bitterly dubbed "Hoovervilles," were made from crates and cartons. Meanwhile, a drought withered crops and made the Great Plains into badlands. "Dust Bowl" conditions obliterated three hundred million tons of topsoil, equal to 3,000 hundred-acre farms. Farm families moved west to find jobs in California. The Depression created hard times for all Americans. Failure and helplessness dropped like a shroud over the spirit of a starving nation; the suicide rates increased as people lost hope of employment in hopes of feeding their families. Farmers began to destroy their crops or let them rot in the

The 1930s was a defining decade in America's history it was a test of the nation's strength and resulted in many changes, both good and bad. One of the many challenges America faced was the disastrous dust storms in the southern Great Plains. In the years before the dust storms began, farmers cleared the land of the grass in order to plant wheat when the drought came the wheat failed, resulting the Dust Bowl ("Dust Bowl 1931-1939" 3). These storms caused the greatest migration in U.S. history, with about 2.5 million farmers and their families leaving the plains ("Dust Bowl 1931-1939" 3). The Dust Bowl was an enormous struggle that resulted in many economic and agricultural problems that were going to be extremely strenuous to fix. Because

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. They were perpetually at the mercy of the farmers. They would promptly become friendless.

The image that Dorothea Lange captured of a fearful and desperate weather-beaten woman, with her three children, has become the ideal representation of the desperation and hardships that many families have gone through during the Great Depression in America. In the article “ The Harvest Gypsies”, John Steinbeck portrays the desperation when he declares “ The father and mother now feel that paralyzed with numbness with which the mind protects itself against too much sorrow and too much pain” (Steinbeck n. pag.).When no food could be grown and no money could be made, entire families packed up everything they had and began the journey to California. Without even looking back at the past, many families left their hometown farms , only to end

California may have gained statehood on September 9, 1850, but the roots that the early Spaniards created, has made California the mecca it is today. California is very diverse state it has desserts, mountains, and is next to the ocean. This creates endless possibilities for growth in many different economy drive industries to flood this great state. The major industries that have made California this mecca are the movie studio system, the aerospace industry, and the agriculture business. In my option the most important industry in California is the agriculture business, I will try not to bore you with my two cents on this topic. Agriculture is a major industry for the Golden State. With 80,500 farms and ranches, California agriculture is a

The experience that the majority of urban and rural Americans shared together during the depression was a flat out lack of income. The differences were very few, but in the cities, the depression was more prominently visible because of a higher percentage of the population (Schultz 2014). Besides the lack of income and employment, most Americans underwent periods of time being extremely hungry. In the cities, people spent hours waiting in breadlines and were losing their homes to only end up living on the streets in communities referred to as "Hoovervilles" nicknamed after the president (Schultz 2014). In the country, families suffered because of unusual droughts of the 1930 's that caused crops to fail miserably meant the already indebted farmers commonly lost their properties. At one time in 1932, there were near to 250,000 homeless children throughout America. By far the ones who fared much worse off were African Americans owing to the fact that they were already impoverished anyway. The fact was white Americans were preferable as employees at that day and age, so black Americans were considered the first to be fired in

The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named María is an essay by Judith Ortiz Cofer that addresses the impact of stereotyping on Latino women. Throughout the essay, Cofer relates her personal experiences with stereotypes to discuss how they have negatively affected her life and the lives of other Latinas. She also explains how these stereotypes originated and calls on her audience, the majority-white non-Latino population, to stop propagating the stereotypical portrayals of Latino women. In The Myth of the Latin Woman, Cofer speaks out about how stereotyping hinders the process of assimilating to a new culture by appealing to ethos through her personal experiences, using similes that show how stereotypes create isolation, and adopting

Madness as a theme plays an important role in Bram Stoker 's “Dracula”, almost every character at some point exhibits some kind of behaviour which could be connected with mental instability. “The working notes for the novel show that the idea of madness was present from an early stage; a cast list dating from the spring of 1890 includes a mad doctor and a mad patient who has ‘a theory of perpetual life’.” (Pedlar136). Even though, male and female characters are equally susceptible to madness, their actions and states which are similar in their nature are seen and dealt with in different ways. Madness in its most broad definition is a concept that is frequently used, but not fully explained or understood by Stoker “…the idea of insanity was an integral part of the Stoker 's conception, but his reading

Intro: “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane” (PHILIP K. DICK, Valis). In present day America laws have been placed that prevent people who are “insane” to be guilty of the crimes they commit. In short, insanity is the state of being seriously mentally ill relating to madness. This is presented in the book Medea written by Euripides through her point of view. In Medea, a surge of insanity purges her after she is betrayed by her husband Jason causing many cruel and harsh actions to follow from her. The ending result a murder scene. Is she really at blame for her actions and should she be punished? Believing that she is truly insane this would entail that she is completely innocent and therefore not to be punished.

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. Those who did move still struggled with things because farming was difficult but they did manage. Until, a drought came upon the middle of the nation. Many farmers had little to no money because they couldn’t work. As a result of the drought, the topsoil

The term “American dream” was coined in 1931 by James Adams. It is defined as the dream of a land where life is fuller and richer for everyone. This dream has been shared by millions of people all over the world since America was discovered. People such as European immigrants, and even people born in the Americas who wanted to expand west. The Joad family’s journey is a prime example of the determinism families had to try to live the American dream. Through John Steinbeck's plot in The Grapes of Wrath,  the struggle of the typical American dreamer is depicted in the Joad’s attempt to move to California for a better life.

The Pacific grew cooler than normal and the Atlantic became warmer. The combination weakened and changed the direction of the jet stream. "The jet stream is that air current usually carries moisture from the Gulf of Mexico up toward the Great Plains, and it then dumps rain when it reaches the Rockies." "How the Dust Bowl Environmental Disaster Impacted the US Economy. The Scary Thing Is That It Could Happen Again." TheBalance.com, 19 March 2018, https://www.thebalance.com/what-was-the-dust-bowl-causes-and-effects-3305689. But due to the shift in weather patterns, the jet stream got moved south which resulted in rain never reaching the Great Plains. It caused the region to live in a drought for almost a decade. There were four waves of droughts, one right after another. The droughts occurred in 1930-31, 1934, 1936, and 1939-1940. The affected regions could not recover from the previous drought before the next drought hit which made it feel like one long drought that just progressively got worse. The last drought didn't even end until 1940.The drought made it harder to harvest the crops the farmers needed to support themselves financially, so the economy declined dramatically. This was also one of the leading causes of the Great

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.” In The Harvest Gypsies, Steinbeck also describes decreasing morale in the displaced farmers as he says “the dullness shows in the faces…and in addition there is a sullenness that makes them taciturn.” The difficulty of finding adequate work to support a family during the Dust Bowl was extremely high—and as the work was competitive, these farmers implicated the work ethic that began at the beginning of the 20th