Prelude to the Dust Bowl

Prelude to the Dust Bowl
Author: Kevin Z. Sweeney
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2016-11-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806158476

Before the drought of the early twenty-first century, the dry benchmark in the American plains was the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But in this eye-opening work, Kevin Z. Sweeney reveals that the Dust Bowl was only one cycle in a series of droughts on the U.S. southern plains. Reinterpreting our nation’s nineteenth-century history through paleoclimatological data and firsthand accounts of four dry periods in the 1800s, Prelude to the Dust Bowl demonstrates the dramatic and little-known role drought played in settlement, migration, and war on the plains. Stephen H. Long’s famed military expedition coincided with the drought of the 1820s, which prompted Long to label the southern plains a “Great American Desert”—a destination many Anglo-Americans thought ideal for removing Southeastern Indian tribes to in the 1830s. The second dry trend, from 1854 to 1865, drove bison herds northeastward, fomenting tribal warfare, and deprived Civil War armies in Indian Territory of vital commissary. In the late 1880s and mid-1890s, two more periods of drought triggered massive outmigration from the southern plains as well as appeals from farmers and congressmen for federal famine relief, pleas quickly denied by President Grover Cleveland. Sweeney’s interpretation of familiar events through the lens of drought lays the groundwork for understanding why the U.S. government’s reaction to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s was such a radical departure from previous federal responses. Prelude to the Dust Bowl provides new insights into pivotal moments in the settlement of the southern plains and stands as a timely reminder that drought, as part of a natural climatic cycle, will continue to figure in the unfolding history of this region.

Dust Bowl

Dust Bowl
Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 1982
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780195032123

In the mid 1930s, North America's Great Plains faced one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in world history. Donald Worster's classic chronicle of the devastating years between 1929 and 1939 tells the story of the Dust Bowl in ecological as well as human terms.Now, twenty-five years after his book helped to define the new field of environmental history, Worster shares his more recent thoughts on the subject of the land and how humans interact with it. In a new afterword, he links the Dust Bowl to current political, economic and ecological issues--including the American livestock industry's exploitation of the Great Plains, and the on-going problem of desertification, which has now become a global phenomenon. He reflects on the state of the plains today and the threat of a new dustbowl. He outlines some solutions that have been proposed, such as "the Buffalo Commons," where deer, antelope, bison and elk would once more roam freely, and suggests that we may yet witness a Great Plains where native flora and fauna flourish while applied ecologists show farmers how to raise food on land modeled after the natural prairies that once existed.

Letters from the Dust Bowl

Letters from the Dust Bowl
Author: Caroline Henderson
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2003
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780806135403

A collection of letters and articles written by Caroline Henderson between 1908 and 1966 which provide insight into her life in the Great Plains, featuring both published materials and private correspondence. Includes a biographical profile, chapter introductions, and annotations.

Dust Bowl

Dust Bowl
Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2004-09-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780195174885

Personal recollections recreate experiences of two Dust Bowl communities

Plowman's Folly

Plowman's Folly
Author: Edward H. Faulkner
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2015-01-06
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0806148748

Mr. Faulkner’s masterpiece is recognized as the most important challenge to agricultural orthodoxy that has been advanced in this century. Its new philosophy of the soil, based on proven principles and completely opposed to age-old concepts, has had a strong impact upon theories of cultivation around the world. It was on July 5, 1943, when Plowman’s Folly was first issued, that the author startled a lethargic public, long bemused by the apparently insoluble problem of soil depletion, by saying, simply, “The fact is that no one has ever advanced a scientific reason for plowing.” With the key sentence, he opened a new era.For generations, our reasoning about the management of the soil has rested upon the use of the moldboard plow. Mr. Faulkner proved rather conclusively that soil impoverishment, erosion, decreasing crop yields, and many of the adverse effects following droughts or periods of excessive rainfall could be traced directly to the practice of plowing natural fertilizers deep into the soil. Through his own test-plot and field-scale experiments, in which he prepared the soil with a disk harrow, in emulation of nature’s way on the forest floor and in the natural meadow, by incorporating green manures into its surface, he transformed ordinary, even inferior, soils into extremely productive, high-yield croplands.Time magazine called this concept “one of the most revolutionary ideas in agriculture history.” The volume is being made available again not only because farmers, ranchers, gardeners, and agriculturists demanded it, but also because it details the kind of “revolution” which will aid those searching for the fruits of the earth in the emerging nations.

Hoptopia

Hoptopia
Author: Peter A. Kopp
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2016-09-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520277473

"Hoptopia argues that the current revolution in craft beer is the product of a complex global history that converged in the hop fields of Oregon's Willamette Valley. What spawned from an ideal environment and the ability of regional farmers to grow the crop rapidly transformed into something far greater because Oregon farmers depended on the importation of rootstock, knowledge, technology, and goods not only from Europe and the Eastern United States but also from Asia, Latin America, and Australasia. They also relied upon a seasonal labor supply of people from all of these areas as a supplement to local Euroamerican and indigenous communities to harvest their crops. In turn, Oregon hop farmers reciprocated in exchanges of plants and ideas with growers and scientists around the world, and, of course, sent their cured hops into the global marketplace. These global exchanges occurred not only during Oregon's golden era of hop growing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but through to the present in the midst of the craft beer revival. The title of this book, Hoptopia, is a nod to Portland's title of Beervana and the Willamette Valley's claim as an agricultural Eden from the mid-nineteenth century onward. But the story is fundamentally about how seemingly niche agricultural regions do not exist and have never existed independently of the flow of people, ideas, goods, and biology from other parts of the world. To define Hoptopia is to define the Willamette Valley's hop and beer industries as the culmination of all of this local and global history. With the hop itself as a central character, this book aims to connect twenty-first century consumers to agricultural lands and histories that have been forgotten in an era of industrial food production"--Provided by publisher.

American Triumph

American Triumph
Author: Susan Martins Miller
Publisher: Barbour Publishing
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2012-08-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1607420171

Girls are girls wherever they live—and the Sisters in Time series shows that girls are girls whenever they lived, too! This new collection brings together four historical fiction books for 8–12-year-old girls: Rosa Takes a Chance: Mexican Immigrants in the Dust Bowl Years (1935), Mandy the Outsider: Prelude to World War 2 (1939), Jennie’s War: The Home Front in World War 2 (1944), and Laura’s Victory: End of the Second World War (1945), American Triumph will transport readers back to America’s overcoming of huge national challenges, teaching important lessons of history and Christian faith. Featuring bonus educational materials such as time lines and brief biographies of key historical figures, American Triumph is ideal for anytime reading and an excellent resource for home schooling.

Manoomin

Manoomin
Author: Barbara J Barton
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1628953284

This is the first book of its kind to bring forward the rich tradition of wild rice in Michigan and its importance to the Anishinaabek people who live there. Manoomin: The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan focuses on the history, culture, biology, economics, and spirituality surrounding this sacred plant. The story travels through time from the days before European colonization and winds its way forward in and out of the logging and industrialization eras. It weaves between the worlds of the Anishinaabek and the colonizers, contrasting their different perspectives and divergent relationships with Manoomin. Barton discusses historic wild rice beds that once existed in Michigan, why many disappeared, and the efforts of tribal and nontribal people with a common goal of restoring and protecting Manoomin across the landscape.

From Praha to Prague

From Praha to Prague
Author: Philip D. Smith
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2017-10-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806159626

Around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Czechs left their homelands in Bohemia and Moravia and came to the United States. While many settled in major American cities, others headed to rural areas out west where they could claim their own land for farming. In From Praha to Prague, Philip D. Smith examines how the Czechs who founded and settled in Prague, Oklahoma, embraced the economic and cultural activities of their American hometown while maintaining their ethnic identity. According to Smith, the Czechs of Prague began as a clannish group of farmers who participated in the 1891 land run and settled in east-central Oklahoma. After the town’s incorporation in 1902, settlers from other ethnic backgrounds swiftly joined the fledgling community, and soon the original Czech immigrants found themselves in the minority. By 1930, the Prague Czechs had reached a unique cultural, social, and economic duality in their community. They strove to become reliable, patriotic citizens of their adopted country—joining churches, playing sports, and supporting the Allied effort in World War II—but they also maintained their identity as Czechs through local traditions such as participating in the Bohemian Hall society, burying their dead in the town’s Czech National Cemetery, and holding the annual Kolache Festival, a lively celebration that still draws visitors from around the world. As a result, Smith notes, succeeding generations of Prague Czechs have proudly considered themselves Czech Americans: firmly assimilated to mainstream American culture but holding to an equally strong sense of belonging to a singular ethnic group. As he analyzes the Czech experience in farm-town Oklahoma, Smith explores several intriguing questions: Was it easier or more difficult for Czechs living in a rural town to sustain their ethnic identity and culture than for Czechs living in large urban areas such as Chicago? How did the tactics used by Prague Czechs to preserve their group identity differ from those used in rural areas where immigrant populations were the majority? In addressing these and other questions, From Praha to Prague reveals the unique path that Prague Czechs took toward Americanization.

Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy

Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy
Author: Albert Marrin
Publisher: Yearling
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2015-02-10
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0553499351

On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City burst into flames. The factory was crowded. The doors were locked to ensure workers stay inside. One hundred forty-six people—mostly women—perished; it was one of the most lethal workplace fires in American history until September 11, 2001. But the story of the fire is not the story of one accidental moment in time. It is a story of immigration and hard work to make it in a new country, as Italians and Jews and others traveled to America to find a better life. It is the story of poor working conditions and greedy bosses, as garment workers discovered the endless sacrifices required to make ends meet. It is the story of unimaginable, but avoidable, disaster. And it the story of the unquenchable pride and activism of fearless immigrants and women who stood up to business, got America on their side, and finally changed working conditions for our entire nation, initiating radical new laws we take for granted today. With Flesh and Blood So Cheap, Albert Marrin has crafted a gripping, nuanced, and poignant account of one of America's defining tragedies.