The Dust Bowl Updated Edition

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

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 ""Dust Bowl"" describes both a time in American history (mid-1930s) and a region (the Great Plains). Severe weather, misuse of land by farmers, and economic pressures from the Great Depression meant that farmers and families in a large area of the central U.S. were faced with loss of usable land, lack of work, and poverty. This is their story, told in their words and in photographs. Included are newspaper accounts, letters, interviews, memoirs, songs, government documents, FDR's Second New Deal, and an excerpt from Steinbeck's ""Grapes of Wrath.""

A young boy listens to his grandfather's story of farm life during the Dust Bowl years.

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.

"Uses primary sources to tell the story of the Dust Bowl"--

"Describes the people and events of the U.S. Dust Bowl. The reader's choices reveal the historical details from the perspectives of a farmer, a migrant worker, and a government photographer"--Provided by publisher.