Studying the Dust Bowl

You’re a U.S. history student in Texas — boy, howdy, do you need to know about the Dust Bowl!

Tractor buried by windblown dust, Rosebud area, South Dakota, 1935

Missed the handout? Oops.

Check these sources:

• Surviving the Dust Bowl, at American Experience — this film we saw clips from in class; watch it all (you can watch it online), explore the website; see especially the article on Black Sunday (April 14, 1935); see the article on the exodus from the Great Plains; see the article on how the New Deal and FDR dealt with the events
• The old Soil Conservation Service (SCS) has been renamed the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) in the Department of Agriculture; see this history of the Dust Bowl at their site. The Dust Bowl was a major spur to the creation of the SCS, and it led to a worldwide search for solutions on how to conserve topsoil from all forms of erosion
• The Dust Bowl, at U.S. History.com
• Dust Bowl and Drought, at the U.S. Drought Mitigation Center
• The story of the famous Dust Bowl film, “The Plow that Broke the Plains”; watch the documentary here, at TopDocumentary.com
• “Voices from the Dust Bowl,” an online exhibit from the American Memory Collection at the Library of Congress
• Weedpatch Camp website: Where did the Okies go? “Published in 1939, John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath drew attention to the hardships faced by the ‘Okies’: poor farmers who moved from the Dust Bowl area to California in search of work. While writing the book, John Steinbeck visited Bakersfield, California and based his book on Arvin Federal Government Camp which he portrayed as ‘Weedpatch Camp.'”This camp exists today and is still used by migrant workers.”

Could we have another Dust Bowl?  Have our conservation practices improved enough to prevent another such occurrence?  Has the climate changed to make it more likely, or more unlikely, that we’ll see a dust disaster again?