Topics on the Page

Event Summary

• Dramatic Event page on The Great Depression and the New Deal

Primary Sources

Influential Literature page for The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Science of the Dust Bowl

Music of the Dust Bowl

 Woody Guthrie, Singer and Activist

 Up From the Dust

• A game where the player is a farmer living through the Great Depression and devastation of the Dust Bowl. The user has to make decisions similar to those a person living during the Great Depression would make

Copyright 2009, 2016, David Burns 

Event Summary

The Dust Bowl, 1930 to 1940, Library of Congress

• One of the worst environmental disasters of the 20th Century

• 3 million people left their farms on the Great Plains

• Half a million migrated to other states

 

About the Dust Bowl, from Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois

Homestead and Farm in Texas County, Oklahoma

  Primary Sources

Letters from the Dust Bowl

Dust Bowl Primary Source Set, Library of Congress


Letter from a Dust Bowl Survivor


Learning about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl Through Primary Sources, Oklahoma Historical Society


Dust Bowl Migration, Library of Congress

Listen to Mrs. Flora Robertson Talk about Dust Storms in Oklahoma

The Great American Dust Bowl. Don Brown. Houghton Mifflin, 2012. Graphic novel describing the Dust Bowl and its causes

Trailer for the PBS Video, the Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl: A Film by Ken Burns

Resettled Farm Child, 1935. Image by Dorothea Lange

Science of the Dust Bowl

Did Dust Storms Make the Dust Bowl Worse?Columbia University

NASA Scientists are Comparing Climate Change to the Dust Bowl, Business Insider Magazine (October 20, 2015)

• See also NASA Explains the Dust Bowl Drought

Minnesota Students Interview Elders Who Survived the Great Depression



See Influential Literature Page on The Grapes of Wrath

Music of the Dust Bowl

Songs of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl Migrants, Library of Congress

Dust Bowl Ballads, Smithsonian Folkways

Woody Guthrie Mural, Okemah, Oklahoma

Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl Blues, audio on YouTube with images added from the album Dust Bowl Ballads

• Dust Bowl Ballads was Woody Guthrie's first commercial album

Ry Cooder and Dust Bowl Ballads

• Ry Cooder and Chicken Skin Band perform Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballard Do Re Mi in 1977

• Dust Bowl Disaster, Arlo Guthrie

See Woody Guthrie Historical Biography Page