Dust Bowl

American  

[duhst bohl] / ˈdʌst ˌboʊl /

noun

1. a period, throughout the 1930s, when waves of severe drought and dust storms in the North American prairies occurred, having devastating consequences for the residents, livestock, and agriculture there.

   When the Dust Bowl began, the Great Depression was already underway—it was one disaster on top of another.

2. the region that suffered from these waves of drought and dust storms, including the entire U.S. Midwest and, in Canada, the southern prairies of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

   Our Oklahoma panhandle was smack dab in the center of that heartless Dust Bowl.

3. (lowercase) any similar dry region elsewhere.

   Where we see the tragic formation of dust bowls in Asia and Africa, overgrazing is believed to be the main culprit.

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dust bowl ¹ British  

noun

1. a semiarid area in which the surface soil is exposed to wind erosion and dust storms occur

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Dust Bowl ² British  

noun

1. the area of the south central US that became denuded of topsoil by wind erosion during the droughts of the mid-1930s

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Dust Bowl Cultural  

1. A parched region of the Great Plains, including parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, where a combination of drought and soil erosion created enormous dust storms in the 1930s. The novel The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, describes the plight of the “Okies” and “Arkies” uprooted by the drought and forced to migrate to California.

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Etymology

Origin of Dust Bowl

An Americanism dating back to 1935–40

Example Sentences

But I held up one of the images from The Other California - 1975, and it was this Okie, a guy that was born during the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and moved out to California.

From Los Angeles Times

His parents, who both had eighth-grade educations, moved to L.A. in the 1930s, part of the Dust Bowl migration depicted in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

From Los Angeles Times

The influx of newcomers to North Dakota runs counter to decades of trends on the rural Great Plains, where many counties peaked in population before the Dust Bowl and have been losing residents for almost a century.

From New York Times

A recent study in Environmental Research Letters by Stanford University climate scientists examined global warning's impact on the U.S. crop insurance program, which Congress established in the 1930s to revive domestic agriculture in the wake of the Dust Bowl.

From Scientific American

Another climate refugee crisis in this country as bad as or worse than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s is almost certainly just around the corner.

From Salon