Dust Bowl

[duhst bohl]

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.

Dust Bowl

¹

noun

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

dust bowl

²

noun

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

Dust Bowl

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.

Word History and Origins

Origin of Dust Bowl¹

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.

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We talked about the dust bowl in the Great Plains, where he’d attended college; the tragic crash of the Hindenburg blimp; and concert vocalist Marian Anderson’s performance before more than seventy-five thousand people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Read more on Literature

But this is foundational stuff for a filmmaker specializing in American figures, institutions and events — the Dust Bowl, Prohibition, women’s suffrage, baseball, the buffalo, Muhammad Ali, the Central Park Five, Frank Lloyd Wright, the National Parks and Mark Twain.

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The novel tells the story of a family of Oklahoma tenant farmers who lose their land during the Dust Bowl and migrate to California in search of work and stability.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

Though such matters were not discussed at the dinner table, Fonda’s father raised money for Democratic candidates and starred in politically imbued films such as “The Grapes of Wrath,” about the exploitation of migrant workers during the Dust Bowl, and “12 Angry Men,” which focused on prejudice, groupthink and the importance of due process during the McCarthy era.

Read more on Los Angeles Times