The decade started with dry years in 1930 and 1931 especially in the East. Then, 1934 recorded extreme drought over almost 80 percent of the United States. Extreme drought conditions returned in 1936, 1939 and 1940. The drought made the Depression worse, especially in the Great Plains.
Many people were killed because they were suffocated by the dust. The dust bowl was a big issue for the country. About 9 years after the dust bowl started the Great Depression
On New Year’s Day 1927, the main river at Cairo, Illinois, broke flood stage, the earliest instance on record. In January Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville flooded. The saturated land throughout the Mississippi valley could absorb no more water, but water still came. In conjunction with the melting of a vast snowpack, virtually the entire Mississippi River system flooded in the spring of 1927, killing people from Virginia to Oklahoma. But the greatest concern lay along the lower Mississippi, from Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf, and tributaries feeding into that part of America.
The two things that contributed to the start of the dust bowl are, over-farming and drought. The dust bowl was a terrible dust storm that devastated lives of thousands in the Southern Great Plains. The dust bowl occurred in the 1930’s. People called this time the blackest year.
Imagine living in a period where there was pure dust. Well, in the 1930s there was an environmental disaster in the Midwest called the Dust Bowl. According to Jess C. Porter, “The dust bowl was a period of severe drought accompanied by high winds and high temperatures” (1). Even though the dust storm made the dust bowl worse, the dust bowl was a harsh period of time because the dust bowl caused poverty and it caused many Americans to migrate to California.
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 frontiers of farming made the area more susceptible to soil erosion which blew dust that made people sick from dust pneumonia (Noel Sander).Illnesses would often last for a long time because there was no one there to treat the sick. Wind driven dust storms had appeared in a large number of counties in western Kansas and the. Dust storms had arisen in Oklahoma and Texas panhandles on several occasions between 1933 and 1935, each time filling the air with millions of tons of
The Dust Bowl took place in the 1930’s, which was also referred to as the “Dirty Thirties” lasted nearly a decade. During this time there were severe dust storms that caused major agriculture devastation primarily in the southern plains. Tens of thousands of families were forced to abandon their homes and farms, and relocated westward.
Finally came Black Tuesday (29 October, 1929) by when the markets had most certainly crashed and around $25 billion ( $319 billion in today's dollars) and 15,000 miles of ticker tape paper had been lost. Stocks continued to fall till 13 November, 1929. The depression had set in by then and had already started spreading in great intensity to the rest of the
His characters and incidents were naturally taken from era of 1930’s what he has seen and experienced during this period. 1930’s were one of the toughest periods for America and Americans because of the ‘Great Depression’. The period of mass unemployment and economic collapse this followed the stock-market “crash” of 1929. In the rich agricultural area of California, the depression created a situation which urgently in need of reform. Another situation strike American by 1935 as ‘dust Bowl’ in the areas of Great Plains, that vast region of the United States which begins at the western limit of the Mississippi Valley and raises gradually to the foot hills of the Rocky Mountains, occupying large sections of such states like North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
The Grapes of Wrath remains perceptibly an angry book .... And it gives a final powerful impression of a growing … anger among those people themselves" (Steinbeck, Introduction xi). The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck. The book won the National book award II and Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In Many ways, the novel is considered a tragic story of defeat and loss due to the depression caused at that time when the United States was just getting on its feet economically.