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,...

An introduction to the causes, events, and consequences of the extreme drought and dust storms that affected the Great Plains during the 1930s.

Describes the economic and environmental conditions that led to the Great Depression and the horrific dust storms that drove people from their homes westward during the 1930s.

"Dust Bowl, USA is a critical examination of the myths and memories that grew out of the hard times in the Great Plains. Across the nation, newspapers, magazines, books, films, and songs produced imagery of blight for local and mass audiences. As modern technology, irrigation projects, and government programs were extended on a wider scale during the "dirty thirties," the saga of the frontier continued to unfold through accounts of dust, drought,...

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 nations nineteenth-century history through paleoclimatological data and firsthand accounts of four dry periods in the 1800s, Prelude to the Dust Bowl demonstrates...