Timothy Egan's 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.

Through the completion of this project, my knowledge of the dustbowl has considerably expanded. I have learned about the dustbowl through textbook and lectures in class; however, this project has taught me the most about the dustbowl than any other source of information. This project improved my understanding of the dustbowl due to the fact that we used primary sources for our information. Primary sources allow us to get first-hand experience for any event and an actual account as to what happened. Although secondary sources helped my understanding of the dustbowl, primary sources gave me an actual representation of what occurred during the dustbowl through the use of providing interviews, photographs, and articles during the period of the dustbowl.

The French and Indian war (1754-63) resulted in political, economic and ideological relations between British and its American colonies.

The dust bowl was considered the “Worst hard time” in american history. The Dust Bowl was a big cloud of dust that took place during the 1930’s in the middle of the Great Depression. The dust bowl was located in the southern great plains as it affected states like Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. The three main causes of the Dust Bowl were drought (Doc E), amount of land being harvest (Doc D), and the death shortgrass prairie (Doc C).

The most beautiful individuals are the ones who went through one of the toughest situations but, yet, came out victorious in a fight that could not be only physically won but mentally. During the Great Depression, there were various factors that played a tremendous role in the devastation on the American people. The Dust Bowl, in 1934, coerced darkness across the Great Plains in America as the rains ceased completely in the earlier 1930s (“Dust”). Soil starved from water sought out for revenge and strangled the life out of the settler’s crops, prosperity, and life as they knew it. To make an already terrible situation even worse, the Great Depression developed and began its toll on the citizens of America when the stock market crashed and farmers

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.

One night in 1890, the Sioux were performing their native ritual, the Ghost Dance. Out of nowhere a group of American soldiers destroyed the Sioux’s peace by opening fire in the middle of this ritual and brutally murdering dozens of innocent Sioux members. This bloody massacre happened because of Westward Expansion. When Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana territory from the French government for $18 million, it started the United States on this path toward expansion. The Louisiana Purchase spread from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans. It doubled the size of the United States. In 1840, seven million people lived in the West searching for economic opportunities. John O’Sullivan, in describing this Westward

The Dust Bowl swept across the southern Plains in the 1930s. During the Dust Bowl there were severe dust storms and it was a drought. During the 1930s the great depression was going on.The Dust Bowl made the depression be felt even more. Life on the Plains (Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico) changed very much. Many farmers had to find new jobs and some even lost homes because the shortage on crops to sell. From 1931 to 1939 the Dust Bowl went on. Finally, in 1939 rain came down and ended the Dust Bowl.

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.

While analyzing the nature of American stimulus, Scott Russell Sanders proclaimed, “But who would pretend that a history of migration has immunized the United States against bigotry?” (Sanders 40). Sanders was a firm believer that America had transformed into a state of take-and-abandon. He made several observations and analogies that highlighted the privation of conservatism. Sanders saw that when people fished a stream, they did not fish it with concern for population of the fish, they fished it until not a fish was left, before moving on to the next stream; when a farmer utilized a field, rather than caring for the field, when the soil quality dropped, the farmer would find somewhere new to settle. Both of the prior are illustrations of

The Dust Bowl was a very pro-founding topic in American history. It was a period of severe dust storms that occurred in the American Great Plains during the years 1930-1936. Donald Worster wrote a scholarly book, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, that reflects on the drastic effects of the event. Worster also offers his reasoning as to why the Dust Bowl happened. He claims, “The dust bowl was the darkest moment in the 20th century life of the southern plains... it was also an event of national, even planetary significance.” This claim is important because the Dust Bowl was truly significant to the development of this era, it was not just a natural disaster, it also affected the natural environment and economy of the United States.

The Dust Bowl is the worst storm in the time period of the 1930s. ¨Dirty Thirties¨ as they call it was a really dark windy sandy place. Before the Dust bowl it was a dry dusty place that people could not see when they plowed to plant crops. The people caught in the Dust Bowl were impacted greatly because the dust killed their crops and made it really dark, so laws were made to prevent this from happening again.

One group of ninth graders was put to the task of surviving one winter, 240 days, in the dust bowl with limited food and water. During this eight months the group of four, two males and two females, had only one cow, one bull, 500 bushels of wheat, and 500 gallons of drinkable water. This group decided that the best way to survive would be that every person would get 2.6 gallons of water to last them 5 days and after that five days pass each person would get an additional 2.6 gallons. Furthermore, the best way for the food would be to kill the bull and the cow straight away and eat 1.5 servings of meat every two days and three bushels of wheat for the first 120 days, then to eat up to 6 servings of wheat per day

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. Oklahoma was so terribly destroyed, it was an awful tragedy.

The Stone Age was the first known period where humans began using rock and other nonmetallic materials such as bones and leather to create tools.