If there’s anything that just about sums up the desperation of the Great Depression in one filthy package, it’s photos of the Dust Bowl, when over-farming resulted in roving dust storms choking large swathes of the Great Plains region. Now, scientists are projecting that climate change could bring those hardscrabble…
New research shows that a repeat of 1930s drought conditions would be comparably destructive to US crops, despite modern agricultural techniques. The news gets considerably worse in light of climate change.
A group of disparate explorers settle in a bountiful alien land. Through technology they transform the world, making it beautiful, hospitable, profitable. And little by little, they doom themselves. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan, is a…
When the "frontier" was first being settled, prairie rabbits were a boon. They were easy game for hungry families. But during the Depression, they became a terror that whole communities fought through gruesome "Jack Rabbit Drives."
Charles Hatfield was a celebrated rainmaker, but when one of his rainmaking schemes worked too well, he became a notorious rainmaker. Here's how a flooded city refused to pay the man who claimed to have flooded it.
During the Dust Bowl, people living in northern Texas and Oklahoma had to contend with storms of flour-fine dust that could last for days. The dust blasted through the cracks in window frames and under doors, blinded people, and smothered cattle to death. But it also made people into walking tasers.
The current drought in the U.S. certainly feels like it's one for the history books. But it's likely not the worst North America has seen in the last millennium. A new study from NASA shows that a drought in 1934 was by far the worst to strike the continent in 1000 years.
In the 1930s, the southwestern Great Plains suffered a series of severe droughts. Overfarming and overgrazing had destroyed prairie grasses, making the topsoil even more vulnerable to strong winds. NASA scientists now say that one of those drought years, 1934, was the driest and most widespread in a millennium.
Some of America's biggest historical events, like Gettysburg or the Dust Bowl, are also some of the most complex—and rife with contradicting accounts. A new digital mapping system aims to apply Google Earth-like functionality to American History's mysteries.