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Definition: dust bowl from Philip's Encyclopedia

Area of c.40 million ha (100 million acres) of the Great Plains, USA, that suffered extensively from wind erosion. Due to drought, overplanting and mismanagement, much of the topsoil was blown away in the 1930s. Subsequent soil conservation programmes have helped restore productivity.


Dust Bowl

From Encyclopedia of Politics of the American West
Coinciding with both drought and economic depression in the 1930s, the Dust Bowl was an ecological, agricultural, and financial disaster for people in a five-state area centered by the Oklahoma panhandle. For about ten years (1930–40) the effects of the Dust Bowl era were felt across a wide swath of the Great Plains region. Because of drought during these years, fields went bare as far north as South Dakota and Wyoming and as far south as Texas. Additionally, farmers and corporate agricultural entities failed to exercise proper crop rotation necessary to preserve nutrients in the soil. Because of this lack of foresight, repeated plowing, and overgrazing by cattle, a layer of loose topsoil developed and was easily picked up by windstorms and carried across the Great Plains in huge dust storms. After several dust storms in 1933 and 1934, the region acquired its nickname because of the biggest dust storm, occurring on April 14, 1935, and remembered as “Black Sunday,” when winds of sixty…
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Full text Article Dust Bowl

From Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History
These three young women wear dust masks to...
During the 1930s a drought-plagued and wind-eroded section of the southern Great Plains of the United States became known as the Dust Bowl. The term refers to an area that included the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas and the adjacent corners of southwestern Kansas, southeastern Colorado, and…
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Full text Article Dust Bowl

From The Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of American Science, Medicine, and Technology
The name Dust Bowl applied to the high plains of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas during the later 1930s as immense dust storms blew across the region, darkening the sky and depositing soil hundreds of miles to the east. At its peak the Dust Bowl covered nearly 100 million acres, …
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Full text Article Dust Bowl

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
the name given to areas of the U.S. prairie states that suffered ecological devastation in the 1930s and then to a lesser extent in the mid-1950s. The problem began during World War I, when the high price of wheat and the needs of Allied troops encouraged farmers to grow more wheat by plowing and…
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The Dust Bowl refers to a period in the United...
1930s Dust bowl is a term coined by an Associated Press correspondent when he described the drought conditions that affected the residents of 27 states as they struggled to grow wheat in the unforgiving weather conditions of the “dirty thirties.” The American South, primarily the plains of Kansas, …
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Full text Article DUST BOWL

From The Reader's Companion to American History
The Dust Bowl was the name given to the Great Plains region devastated by drought in 1930s depression-ridden America. The 150,000-square-mile area, encompassing the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and neighboring sections of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, has little rainfall, light soil, and high…
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Full text Article Dust Bowl

From Environmental History and Global Change: A Dictionary of Environmental History
The Dust Bowl has been identified by George Borgstrom (1973) as one of the three worst ecological blunders in human history. In the USA between the Mississippi and the Rockies lie the prairies of the Great Plains, a vegetation type resulting from a lack of precipitation but whose boundaries with the…
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Full text Article Dust Bowl

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Section of the U.S. Great Plains that extended over southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and northeastern New Mexico. The term originated after World War I, when the area’s grasslands were converted to agricultural fields. In the naturally dry climate, …
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Full text Article Dust Bowl Era and Farm Crisis

From The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor, and Economic History
The farm crisis of the 1920s and 1930s was born out of more than sixty years of federal policy promoting the intense cultivation of land, stretching as far back as the Homestead Act (1862). Yet it was more acutely the result of the boom in export prices that accompanied World War I, along with the…
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Full text Article Dust Bowl

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
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Full text Article dust bowl

From The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language
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