Dust Bowl Essays (Examples)

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Dust Bowl
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Dust Bowl Bibliography
Annotated Bibliography

Bonnifield, Matthew Paul. The Dust Bowl: Men Dirt and Depression. University of New Mexico Press, 1979.

A journalist named Robert Geiger first coined the term Dust Bowl in the 1930s, which was a decade of extreme droughts, blizzards, tornadoes, dust storms and other climatic changes. Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Kansas and other Plains states bore the brunt of this drought, and Dr. Bonnifield lived through it at the time. This region of the country was highly arid and semi-desert even at the best of times, and had undergone a big speculative boom in wheat farming during World War I and the 1920s. When the drought began in 1930, coinciding with the Great Depression, these events caught the Plains farmers completely unaware and unprepared. Many went bankrupt and abandoned their farms, turning into migrant workers and economic refugees on the West Coast. Huge dust storms that continued until 1938 combined….

Although the 1930s as a whole for all farmers were marked by dramatic periods of "boom and bust," for the residents of the Triangle, the periods of "boom" were far shorter and crueler (McNeill 40). Indeed, when "Captain John Palliser first reached the prairies he was said he thought he had "discovered Hell" because the region was so arid and desert-like. Still, Palliser noted "a fertile belt surrounding the region" (Bonikowsky 2007). Like the Great Plains, Indians and buffalo were the main residents (McNeill 41). The British government ignored Palliser's dim prognosis about developing the area and encouraged settlement.
Farmers in the Triangle repeatedly watched entire seasons of crops blow away in the dust, despite their efforts to engage in vigorous, proactive farming techniques like "fallowing (plowing but not sowing a field)," crop rotation (which was not practiced in the American est) and "shallow cultivation to preserve soil moisture, unfortunately….

Dust Bowl Refers to an
PAGES 1 WORDS 349

They are used for the same reasons farmers depleted the soils in Oklahoma in the 1930s, which was to produce a surplus of crops in the hopes of making bigger profits.
Many of those consequences are long-term and might not be noticeable for at least one generation into the future. I think the Dust Bowl situation is interesting because the consequences of poor farming practices did take many decades to manifest. If the Dust Bowl teaches us anything it is that we need to think more in terms of long-term results rather than short-term gains.

Finally, I appreciated learning how the Dust Bowl phenomenon can be applied to other human-caused environmental problems. Any time human beings override common sense in the pursuit of profit, disaster can occur. Whether planting corn and soybeans instead of diverse crops or whether overproducing livestock to fuel the fast food industry, many environmental problems are caused….

Worster's Dust Bowl Is it
PAGES 10 WORDS 3168

S. history. He has held teaching appointments at Brandeis University, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Maine. He serves on the boards of several environmental organizations. His publications include An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American est (1994); The ealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (1993); Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977); and A River Running est: The Life of John esley Powell (2001). He is currently working on a biography of John Muir, to be published by Oxford University Press (Harvard Divinity School, 2006, found online at http://www.hds.harvard.edu/cswr/resources/eve/worster.html)."
orster's credentials reveal him to be well educated in the subject matter that he covers in his book, Dust Bowl. He is a man whose interest in environmental history, especially it focuses on those areas of the country where orster's own life experiences have been shaped, and would familiarize him with the geography and….

Journal Reflections on a Dust Bowl Tale
Out of the Dust -- the Depression in Adolescent Poetry

It is difficult to think of this work as too dark for young individuals, even middle school children, because of its emotional truth and absence of sensationalism. It is written in the poetic voice of an articulate young women about concerns many young people face in real life, namely that of death of a loved one, guilt, and also coping with physical accidents. Moreover, the death of Billie Joe's mother is not gratuitous, or merely a death for sensationalism's sake. The book shows the effects death of a young person's main maternal figure upon a family and a great historical economic crisis, that of the looming Great Depression in the Dust Bowl of Midwestern America. The historical context of the novel gives an added importance and weight to the mother's death and the family's suffering,….

Environmental Themes
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Environmental Themes in Grapes of rath
This essay reviews environmental themes from the following five books: Dust Bowl by Donald orster, The Grapes of rath by John Steinbeck, Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Killing Mr. atson by Peter Matthiessen, and River of Lakes by Bill Belleville. This paper discusses the role that culture has played in environmental issues during the past century. Five sources used. MLA format.

Environmental Themes

Humans from the very beginning of their existence have had an impact, for better or worse, on the environment. Man has for the most part tried to control the environment to suit his needs or tastes of the era. Over-grazing, over hunting, ignoring the importance crop rotations, dam building, and toxic dumping, are but a few of the ways man tries to control. Few societies have ever considered any of the above when it comes to the environment. There are a….


On the other hand, in the Dust Bowl evidence, photos and statistics play a very important role, because they paint a graphic picture of what was going on in the country and how people were suffering. This type of evidence plays a much more important role than in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, which was not so much about photographs and statistics, but about print documents and even the political climate. This indicates how different cases require different perspectives and the use of differing evidence.

The difference in these two historic cases also points to the use of differing evidence to study different moments in history. The Dust Bowl affected millions of people who lost their farms, left the area, and moved to places like California to find work and start new lives. There were books written about it, news stories, and everything in between. The Sacco and Vanzetti case initially….

Bonnie and Clyde
hat accounts for the persistence of the legend of Bonnie and Clyde? For two not particularly distinguished criminals from a bygone era in American history, the staying power in the collective consciousness of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker is nothing short of remarkable. In part, the media has played a substantial role, with the epochal 1967 Arthur Penn film having been succeeded in 2013 by a television miniseries about the duo and their gang. I hope to demonstrate through an examination of the historical source material that the reason for Bonnie and Clyde's persistence is explainable in one single word: economics. hat Bonnie and Clyde signify for later generations of interested readers is a response (howsoever criminal) on the part of ordinary people to the Great Depression that defined America during the Presidency of Herbert Hoover. Although certain other aspects of their short career -- particularly their reliance….

Worst Hard Times Those Who
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The land was already suffering from the eradication of grass because of cattle-farming, the natural balance of the ecosystem had been destroyed as a result of the tyranny and greed of man, and now the land, starving, ate the farmers alive. Dust pneumonia killed men and women living on soil that only a few years ago had yielded wild profits during the wheat boom, when the rest of the world had suffered a wheat shortage.
There is something poignantly human about the attitude towards money and profit in the farmers that everyone can relate to -- how can something that once was so profitable suddenly evaporate, after all? How could the climate change so quickly -- it seemed impossible? Also, vibrant settlements had been built up around the area, after all. These were not small, isolated farming towns in many cases, but true communities that had been enriched by the….

However, it was changes in technology that originally made the cultivation of the land possible, and marked a shift from earlier methods of production, as practiced by Native Americans. hile small Okie farmers might have hated the larger agricultural conglomerates, they too had benefited from technology in past and paid the price when technology destroyed the land. And it was, in the end, technology that also saved such subsistence farmers, in the form of new cultivation methods -- introduced by the federal government.
orks Cited

Cooper, Michael. Dust to Eat. Clarion, 2004.

Davidson, J.R. "Interview." itness. The Dustbowl. PBS. May 1, 2010.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/interview/dustbowl-witness-jr-davison/

"Dust bowl." The Great Depression and orld ar II. May 1, 2010.

http://memory.loc.gov/learn//features/timeline/depwwii/dustbowl/dustbowl.html

"The Dust Bowl." U.S. History. May 1, 2010.

http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1583.html

Egan, Timothy. The orst Hard Time. Mariner, 2006.

"Hugh Hammond Bennett." The Dustbowl. PBS. May 1, 2010.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/biography/dustbowl-bennett/

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of rath. Penguin, 1992.

"hat is drought?" NMNC. May 1, 2010. http://www.drought.unl.edu/whatis/dustbowl.htm

orster, Daniel. Dust Bowl.….

Oklahomans Oklahoma has only been a state in the U.S. since 1907, yet Oklahomans were around well before then. Oklahoma is known as the “sooner” state because settlers had arrived in the territory before it had even been declared part of the United States. In the first half of the 19th century, the region was part of Arkansas Territory. The Native Americans were forced on the Trail of Tears and made to settle in Indian Territory in modern-day Oklahoma. In the latter half of the 19th century, cattle ranchers from Texas drove their cattle through Indian Territory to states up north and out west, paving cattle trails along the way. More and more whites began to settle in the area as a result of these cattle trails and the expansion of the railroad. Then when oil was found, Oklahoma became a major focus for the oil industry and Tulsa became known….

Soviet Union brought the missiles into Cuba to rile up the American military establishment precisely so that U.S. nuclear missile installations in Turkey and Italy could be brought on the table. Secondly as an ally, Soviet Union was concerned about the fate of Cuba which held a lot of promise for the Communist experiment internationally.
The American leadership understood that what they faced in Cuba was a catch 22 situation. If they failed to act, they would live under threat and shadow of nuclear war. If they carried out a full fledge invasion of Cuba, the Soviet Union would respond by taking over West Berlin thereby severely denting the credibility of the United States of America in the eyes of its European allies. Able master of political chess that Khrushchev was he played the inexperienced but charismatic President Kennedy like a fiddle. There were of course some in the military….

The effect of all of this is to drive away those who actually worked the land because they loved it, replacing them with hired hands running machinery, neither of which is likely to be kind to the land.
Monopoly

Perhaps the most familiar form of business except for perfect competition, monopoly situations result when there are many potential buyers for a product or service, but only one seller.

In the Grapes of rath, a monopoly situation is created as the banks decide to remove tenant farmers, preferring to sell the land to a single large conglomerate of landowners or even a single corporation.

Steinbeck could hardly have painted a harsher picture of this monopoly-in-progress, with scenes of huge bulldozers razing all evidence of the tenant farmers from the land. However, he also notes that the 'monopolization' of the Great Plains was seemingly an event bigger even than those landowners who stood to gain.….

The Leblanc alkali production processes were especially pernicious, but they followed along the lines of previous industrial processes. In other words, the first British environmental legislation was a response not so much to a qualitative change in industrial processes and their environmental impact but more to a quantitative increase in sources of pollution that had up to that point been (if only barely) tolerable.
Legislation Arising From Public Anger

At the center of the first British environmental legislation was the Leblanc process, an industrial process that produced of soda ash (which is chemically sodium carbonate) that came into use in the first decades of the 19th century. Named after its inventor, Nicolas Leblanc, it replaced an older process in which soda ash had been produced from wood ash. However, as the availability of wood ash declined (because of deforestation, a process that was occuring both in Great Britain and across Europe….

It was necessary for the returning men to feel that they were coming home to resume their pre-war social roles. Roles that were governed by the rules of a patriarchal society that had changed by way of the roles women assumed in American society while men were away at war. omen became the decision makers, the bread winners, and the family mangers in a way that is portrayed as the exact opposite by June Cleaver's role in her family's life. The need of men prevailed over the reality of women lives, and women were depicted as weak, needy, clingy, and unable to make sound decisions. Instead, John ayne, the handsome and larger than life film figure of a man was there as a rock, the man who actually dictated the role of the women as one of being needy, clingy, and unable to survive without the stronger male counterpart.
Some….

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7 Pages
Annotated Bibliography

Agriculture

Dust Bowl

Words: 2245
Length: 7 Pages
Type: Annotated Bibliography

Dust Bowl Bibliography Annotated Bibliography Bonnifield, Matthew Paul. The Dust Bowl: Men Dirt and Depression. University of New Mexico Press, 1979. A journalist named Robert Geiger first coined the term Dust Bowl…

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2 Pages
Term Paper

Agriculture

Dust Bowl Compare and Contrast

Words: 691
Length: 2 Pages
Type: Term Paper

Although the 1930s as a whole for all farmers were marked by dramatic periods of "boom and bust," for the residents of the Triangle, the periods of "boom"…

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1 Pages
Essay

Agriculture

Dust Bowl Refers to an

Words: 349
Length: 1 Pages
Type: Essay

They are used for the same reasons farmers depleted the soils in Oklahoma in the 1930s, which was to produce a surplus of crops in the hopes of…

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10 Pages
Research Proposal

Literature

Worster's Dust Bowl Is it

Words: 3168
Length: 10 Pages
Type: Research Proposal

S. history. He has held teaching appointments at Brandeis University, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Maine. He serves on the boards of several environmental organizations. His…

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2 Pages
Term Paper

Literature

Out of the Dust by Karen Hasse Course Education 410 Teaching Reading in Middle Schools

Words: 665
Length: 2 Pages
Type: Term Paper

Journal Reflections on a Dust Bowl Tale Out of the Dust -- the Depression in Adolescent Poetry It is difficult to think of this work as too dark for young individuals,…

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20 Pages
Term Paper

Animals

Environmental Themes

Words: 5447
Length: 20 Pages
Type: Term Paper

Environmental Themes in Grapes of rath This essay reviews environmental themes from the following five books: Dust Bowl by Donald orster, The Grapes of rath by John Steinbeck, Everglades: River…

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2 Pages
Research Proposal

Communication - Journalism

Art of Historical Detection by

Words: 667
Length: 2 Pages
Type: Research Proposal

On the other hand, in the Dust Bowl evidence, photos and statistics play a very important role, because they paint a graphic picture of what was going on in…

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6 Pages
Research Paper

Economics

Persistence of Bonnie and Clyde

Words: 1816
Length: 6 Pages
Type: Research Paper

Bonnie and Clyde hat accounts for the persistence of the legend of Bonnie and Clyde? For two not particularly distinguished criminals from a bygone era in American history, the staying…

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4 Pages
Research Proposal

Agriculture

Worst Hard Times Those Who

Words: 1528
Length: 4 Pages
Type: Research Proposal

The land was already suffering from the eradication of grass because of cattle-farming, the natural balance of the ecosystem had been destroyed as a result of the tyranny…

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4 Pages
Research Paper

Agriculture

Agricultural Development System in America

Words: 1514
Length: 4 Pages
Type: Research Paper

However, it was changes in technology that originally made the cultivation of the land possible, and marked a shift from earlier methods of production, as practiced by Native…

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3 Pages
Essay

Sociology

The Character of the Oklahomans

Words: 1012
Length: 3 Pages
Type: Essay

Oklahomans Oklahoma has only been a state in the U.S. since 1907, yet Oklahomans were around well before then. Oklahoma is known as the “sooner” state because settlers had arrived…

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5 Pages
Essay

American History

U S History Abraham Lincoln -

Words: 1833
Length: 5 Pages
Type: Essay

Soviet Union brought the missiles into Cuba to rile up the American military establishment precisely so that U.S. nuclear missile installations in Turkey and Italy could be brought…

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8 Pages
Term Paper

Economics

Economics Most Histories Blame the

Words: 2660
Length: 8 Pages
Type: Term Paper

The effect of all of this is to drive away those who actually worked the land because they loved it, replacing them with hired hands running machinery, neither…

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37 Pages
Dissertation

Transportation - Environmental Issues

Water Legislation Origins of Environmental

Words: 11427
Length: 37 Pages
Type: Dissertation

The Leblanc alkali production processes were especially pernicious, but they followed along the lines of previous industrial processes. In other words, the first British environmental legislation was a…

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6 Pages
Research Proposal

Sports - Women

American Woman the Post World

Words: 1906
Length: 6 Pages
Type: Research Proposal

It was necessary for the returning men to feel that they were coming home to resume their pre-war social roles. Roles that were governed by the rules of…

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