Dust Bowl

This is an important gathering of first-person accounts of the trauma of the 1930s in the Heartland, collected together and assessed by historians from the distance of several decades. Many Americans tell their stories in this book about the Dust Bowl, arguably one of the greatest environmental disasters ever to befall the United States. Their works tell of suffering and resilience, of terrible loss and cautious hope, and of defeat and defiance. The book also looks at the solutions they found for dealing with their plight, including everything from simply packing up and leaving their homes to finding scientific ways to work with, rather than against, the land to embracing radical political solutions. Divided into a section of contemporary accounts and a second of retrospective analysis, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of Western History and the general reader seeking to learn more about what it was like to live in and through the Depression-era Dust Bowl.

Fifty years ago, John Steinbeck's now classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, captured the epic story of an Oklahoma farm family driven west to California by dust storms, drought, and economic hardship. It was a story that generations of Americans have also come to know through Dorothea Lange's unforgettable photos of migrant families struggling to make a living in Depression-torn California. Now in James N. Gregory's pathbreaking American Exodus, there is at last an historical study that moves beyond the fiction and the photographs to uncover the full meaning of these events. American Exodus takes us back to the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and the war boom influx of the 1940s to explore the experiences of the more than one million Oklahomans, Arkansans, Texans, and Missourians who sought opportunities in California. Gregory reaches into the migrants' lives to reveal not only their economic trials but also their impact on California's culture and society. He traces the development of an "Okie subculture" that over the years has grown into an essential element in California's cultural landscape. The consequences, however, reach far beyond California. The Dust Bowl migration was part of a larger heartland diaspora that has sent millions of Southerners and rural Midwesterners to the nation's northern and western industrial perimeter. American Exodus is the first book to examine the cultural implications of that massive 20th-century population shift. In this rich account of the experiences and impact of these migrant heartlanders, Gregory fills an important gap in recent American social history.

Poised on the verge of World War II, America in 1939 was a land of contrasts. The nation was finally pulling out of the Great Depression, but war-clouds gathered on the horizon. Scientific developments offered promising new advances, yet they would soon become the tools of war. This study offers a detailed look at life in this watershed year to determine how Americans understood the conditions of their day and how they turned to escapism when their burdens became too heavy. From the royal visit to the World's Fairs, most Americans looked ahead to a brighter future. Professional athletics, Hollywood films, and the Big Bands were a welcome diversion from hard times and troubling events abroad in Europe and Asia. This account highlights the most important political, economic, and social concerns of 1939.

This study of class during the Great Depression is the first to examine a relatively neglected geographical area, the northern plains states of North and South Dakota, from a social and cultural perspective. Surveying the values and ideals of the old middle class--independent shopkeepers, artisans, professionals, and farmers--Catherine Stock presents a picture of Dakotans' cultural life in the 1920s and 1930s and tells of their efforts to come to terms with the enormous social change brought about by the New Deal. According to Stock, the depression not only destroyed Dakotans' economic foundations but also bankrupted their community organizations and undermined their social relations. She shows that Dakotans' social values, characterized by notions of neighborliness, loyalty, hard work, upright character and individual enterprise, were threatened first by devastating drought and subsequent collapse and then by massive relief efforts and governmental intervention on an unprecedented scale. By 1940, one-third,of all farmers who owned their land had lost it to foreclosure, and the federal government had spent nearly half a billion dollars to aid the region. Stock argues that to Dakotans, the New Deal offered a trade-off between autonomy, community, and local control, on the one hand, and survival itself on the other. Dakotans, ambivalent toward "progress", feared not only for their land, their businesses, their families, and their communities; they feared for the survival of a way of life. They responded, says Stock, by working to make sense of the new world and find renewed meaning in the old. Consulting varied sources such as diaries, autobiographies, oral histories, and newspaperaccounts, Stock includes women's voices as well as men's. She integrates female perspectives on farm life and old-middle-class community into the narrative as a whole and devotes a separate chapter to women's experiences of the up

When The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, it had an explosive effect on the public, calling attention to the problems of migrant farm workers during the Great Depression. This casebook provides a rich source of primary materials on the period and the plight of the migrant farm worker that brings to life the problems Steinbeck immortalized in the novel. Included are interviews with eyewitnesses to the Dust Bowl, firsthand accounts and investigative reports of the causes and effects of the Great Depression, letters, diaries and autobiographies of migrant farm workers in the 1930s, newspaper articles and editorials of the period, affidavits by union activists, and other unique materials, many of which have never before appeared in print. All these materials can be used in literature, American history, and interdisciplinary classes to enrich the study of this novel and its times.

In this new, enlarged edition, John Opie updates his groundbreaking work on the environmental history of the Ogallala aquifer and plains farming. He addresses the impact of the 1996 Farm Bill (Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform Act) and looks at the recent movement of industrial hog farming onto the plains. Opie also develops his argument for the plains as a "moral geography", a view involving the recognition by society that it has an obligation to balance the responsibility for conserving natural resources with that for keeping a regional people -- the family farmers -- in operation.

How and why have Americans living at particular times and places used and transformed their environment? How have political systems dealt with conflicts over resources and conservation? This is the only major reference work to explore all the major themes and debates in the burgeoning field of environmental history. Humanity's relationship with the natural world is one of the oldest and newest topics in human history. The issue emerged as a distinct field of scholarship in the early 1970s and has been growing steadily ever since. The discipline's territory and sources are rich and varied and include climatic and geological data, court records, archaeological digs, and the writings of naturalists, as well as federal and state economic and resource development and conservation policy. Environmental historians investigate how and why natural and human-created surroundings affect a society's development. Merchant provides a context-setting overview of American environmental history from the precolonial land-use practice of Native Americans and concluding with twenty-first concerns over global warming. The book also includes a glossary of important concepts, people, agencies, and legislation; a chronology of major events; and an extensive bibliography including films, videos, CD-ROMs, and websites. This concise reference for students and general readers contains an accessible overview of American environmental history; a mini-encyclopedia of ideas, people, legislation, and agencies; a chronology of events and their significance; and a bibliography of books, magazines, and journals as well as films, videos, CD-ROMs, and online resources. In addition to providing a wealth of factual information, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History explores contentious issues in this much-debated field, from the idea of wilderness to global warming.