The Dust Bowl was a time of hardship and environmental and economic disaster. More than 100 million acres of land had turned to dust, causing hundreds of thousands of people to seek new homes and opportunities thousands of miles away, while millions more chose to stay and battle nature to save their land. FDR's army of photographers took to the roads to document this national crisis. Their pictures spoke a thousand words, and a new form of storytelling- photojournalism-was born. With the help of iconic photographs from Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and many more, Martin Sandler tells the story of a nation as it endured its darkest days and the extraordinary courage and spirit of those who survived.

Housewives hung wet sheets and blankets over windows and struggled to seal every crack with gummed paper strips. A man avoided shaking hands because the static electricity generated from a dust storm might knock his greeter flat. Children's tears turned to mud. Dead cattle, when pried open, were found filled with pounds of gut-clogging dirt. The simplest thing in life, taking a breath, became life threatening. Conditions in America's prairie during the Dirty Thirties were no blind stroke of nature, however. They had their origins in human error and in the misuse of the land. The Dust Bowl recounts the factors that led to these conditions, how those affected coped, and what can be learned from the tragedy, considered by many to be America's worst prolonged environmental disaster.

In the 1930's, great rolling walls of dust swept across the Great Plains. The storms buried crops, blinded animals, and suffocated children. It was a catastrophe that would change the course of American history as people struggled to survive in this hostile environment, or took the the roads as Dust Bowl refugees. Here, in riveting, accessible prose, and illustrated with moving historical quotations and photographs, acclaimed historian Albert Marrin explains the causes behind the disaster and investigates the Dust Bowl's imact on the land and the people. Both a tale of natural destruction and a tribute to those who refused to give up, this is a beautiful exploration of an important time in our country's past.

Before the drought of the early twenty-first century, the dry benchmark in the American plains was the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But in this eye-opening work, Kevin Z. Sweeney reveals that the Dust Bowl was only one cycle in a series of droughts on the U.S. southern plains. Reinterpreting our nation’s nineteenth-century history through paleoclimatological data and firsthand accounts of four dry periods in the 1800s, Prelude to the Dust Bowl demonstrates the dramatic and little-known role drought played in settlement, migration, and war on the plains. Stephen H. Long’s famed military expedition coincided with the drought of the 1820s, which prompted Long to label the southern plains a “Great American Desert”—a destination many Anglo-Americans thought ideal for removing Southeastern Indian tribes to in the 1830s. The second dry trend, from 1854 to 1865, drove bison herds northeastward, fomenting tribal warfare, and deprived Civil War armies in Indian Territory of vital commissary. In the late 1880s and mid-1890s, two more periods of drought triggered massive outmigration from the southern plains as well as appeals from farmers and congressmen for federal famine relief, pleas quickly denied by President Grover Cleveland. Sweeney’s interpretation of familiar events through the lens of drought lays the groundwork for understanding why the U.S. government’s reaction to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was such a radical departure from previous federal responses. Prelude to the Dust Bowl provides new insights into pivotal moments in the settlement of the southern plains and stands as a timely reminder that drought, as part of a natural climatic cycle, will continue to figure in the unfolding history of this region.

This “riveting” companion to the PBS documentary “clarifies our understanding of the ‘worst manmade ecological disaster in American history’” (Booklist). In this riveting chronicle, Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns capture the profound drama of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Terrifying photographs of mile-high dust storms, along with firsthand accounts by more than two dozen eyewitnesses, bring to life this heart-wrenching catastrophe, when a combination of drought, wind, and poor farming practices turned millions of acres of the Great Plains into a wasteland, killing crops and livestock, threatening the lives of small children, burying homesteaders’ hopes under huge dunes of dirt—and setting in motion a mass migration the likes of which the nation had never seen. Burns and Duncan collected more than three hundred mesmerizing photographs, some never before published, scoured private letters, government reports, and newspaper articles, and conducted in-depth interviews to produce a document that may likely be the last recorded testimony of the generation who lived through this defining decade.

Describes how dry, dusty winds and a terrible drought affected farmers and ranchers in the Great Plains for nearly 10 years in the 1930's, labeling the region as the Dust Bowl.

The events surrounding the Dust Bowl did not look the same to everyone involved. Step back in time and into the shoes of an Oklahoma farmer, a migrant farm worker, and a government journalist as readers act out scenes that took place in the midst of this historic event. Written with simplified, considerate text to help struggling readers, books in this series are made to build confidence as readers engage and read aloud. This book includes a table of contents, glossary, index, author biography, sidebars, and timelines.