DUST BOWL 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION: The Southern Plains in the 1930s
About
Donald Worsters classic scholarly history (Oxford University Press, 25th-anniversary edition, about 300 pages) of the 1929 to 1939 Dust Bowl, widely credited with helping found the field of environmental history. It examines the disaster in both ecological and human terms, arguing it was largely man-made, and a new afterword connects it to present-day issues such as land exploitation and global desertification.
Why it’s great
The Dust Bowl was not just bad weather; it was, in large part, a disaster people made. This landmark history examines how farming, economics, and the land collided to turn the Great Plains into a wasteland in the 1930s, and why those lessons still matter as we face soil loss and desertification today. A serious, foundational read for older students who want to understand the consequences of how humans use farmland.
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