Memorializing the Dust Bowl

Contributed By

Resource Type

Keywords

Ken Burns Dust Bowl Sanora Babb Woody Guthrie Dorothea Lange Arthur Rothstein CIO Congress of Industrial Organizations labor unions unions California Farm Security Administration FSA Great Depression Great Plains farming journalism Roy Stryker Walker Evans Russell Lee John Vachon Gordon Parks propaganda natural disaster manmade disaster environmental disasters environmental catastrophes droughts photography photographers journalism journalist No Man's Land Resettlement Administration camera breadlines labor demonstrations portraits Migrant Mother War Relocation Authority Japanese Americans internment camps WRA WWII World War II WW2 world war two second world war rural poverty photojournalism New Deal Look Magazine Parade Magazine John Steinbeck Grapes of Wrath Southern Plains women writers 1930s Garden City Herald Whose Names Are Unknown Ken Burns America WETA

Subjects

History-Social Science The Arts

Grade Levels

Grade 6 Grade 7 Grade 8 Grade 9 Grade 10 Grade 11 Grade 12

Related Resources

Memorializing the Dust Bowl

Learn about the lives of famous Dust Bowl chroniclers, including folk singer Woody Guthrie, writer and journalist Sanora Babb, and photographers Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. The Dust Bowl was a region of the Southwestern Great Plains of the United States that fell into an ecologically disastrous state during the 1930s. A combination of aggressive and poor farming techniques, coupled with drought conditions in the region, created massive dust storms that drove thousands from their homes and created a large migrant population of poor, rural Americans.

Learning Objectives

Students will understand and analyze how and why the federal government documented and memorialized the Dust Bowl.

About the Author:

Eden McCauslin is a Social Studies and English teacher in Chicago Public Schools. Eden previously taught in the District of Columbia Public Schools.

Publisher

PBS Learning Media