Americans View Their Dustbowl Experience

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.