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This article by pbs is a timeline of what happened each year of the dust bowl. They go into depth about what events occurred each year and show many important events that happened during this time.

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Timeline: The Dust Bowl | American Experience | PBS

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For nearly a decade, drought gripped the Great Plains. Explore a timeline of events.

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This article specifally talks about people individual experiences with the dust bowl and how the dust bowl affected the farms. For example they have a chart of people who were alive during this time and what they remember happening.

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The most visible evidence of how dry the 1930s became was the dust storm. Tons of topsoil were blown off barren fields and carried in storm clouds for hundreds of miles. Technically, the driest region of the Plains – southeastern Colorado, southwest Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas – became known as the Dust Bowl, and many dust storms started there. But the entire region, and eventually the entire country, was affected.

The Dust Bowl got its name after Black Sunday, April 14, 1935. More and more dust storms had been blowing up in the years leading up to that day. In 1932, 14 dust storms were recorded on the Plains. In 1933, there were 38 storms. By 1934, it was estimated that 100 million acres of farmland had lost all or most of the topsoil to the winds. By April 1935, there had been weeks of dust storms, but the cloud that appeared on the horizon that Sunday was the worst. Winds were clocked at 60 mph. Then it hit.

"The impact is like a shovelful of fine sand flung against the face," Avis D. Carlson wrote in a New Republic article. "People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk... We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions. It is becoming Real."

The day after Black Sunday, an Associated Press reporter used the term "Dust Bowl" for the first time. "Three little words achingly familiar on the Western farmer's tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent – if it rains." The term stuck and was used by radio reporters and writers, in private letters and public speeches.

In the central and northern plains, dust was everywhere.

The impact of the Dust Bowl was felt all over the U.S. During the same April as Black Sunday, 1935, one of FDR's advisors, Hugh Hammond Bennett, was in Washington D.C. on his way to testify before Congress about the need for soil conservation legislation. A dust storm arrived in Washington all the way from the Great Plains. As a dusty gloom spread over the nation's capital and blotted out the sun, Bennett explained, "This, gentlemen, is what I have been talking about." Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act that same year.

Written by Bill Ganzel of the Ganzel Group. First written and published in 2003.

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The most visible evidence of how dry the 1930s became was the dust storm. Tons of topsoil were blown off barren fields and carried in storm clouds for hundreds of miles. Technically, the driest region of the Plains - southeastern Colorado, southwest Kansas and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas - became known as the Dust Bowl, and many dust storms started there.

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In this Article about the dust bowl by history.com they go into depth about 10 unknown facts about the dust bowl. They talk about how this ecosystem disruption caused plagues and how it was both a manmade and natural disaster.

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1. One monster dust storm reached the Atlantic Ocean.

While "black blizzards" constantly menaced Plains states in the 1930s, a massive dust storm 2 miles high traveled 2,000 miles before hitting the East Coast on May 11, 1934. For five hours, a fog of prairie dirt enshrouded landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and the U.S. Capitol, inside which lawmakers were debating a soil conservation bill. For East Coasters, the storm was a mere inconvenience-"Housewives kept busy," read a New York Times subhead-compared to the tribulations endured by Dust Bowl residents.

2. The Dust Bowl was both a manmade and natural disaster.

Beginning with World War I, American wheat harvests flowed like gold as demand boomed. Lured by record wheat prices and promises by land developers that "rain follows the plow," farmers powered by new gasoline tractors over-plowed and over-grazed the southern Plains. When the drought and Great Depression hit in the early 1930s, the wheat market collapsed. Once the oceans of wheat, which replaced the sea of prairie grass that anchored the topsoil into place, dried up, the land was defenseless against the winds that buffeted the Plains.

3. The ecosystem disruption unleashed plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers.

If the dust storms that turned daylight to darkness weren't apocalyptic enough, seemingly biblical plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers descended on the Plains and destroyed whatever meager crops could grow. To combat the hundreds of thousands of jackrabbits that overran the Dust Bowl states in 1935, some towns staged "rabbit drives" in which townsmen corralled the jackrabbits in pens and smashed them to death with clubs and baseball bats. Thick clouds of grasshoppers-as large as 23,000 insects per acre, according to one estimate-also swept over farms and consumed everything in their wakes. "What the sun left, the grasshoppers took," President Franklin D. Roosevelt said during a fireside chat. The National Guard was called out to crush grasshoppers with tractors and burn infested fields, while the Civilian Conservation Corps spread an insecticide of arsenic, molasses and bran.

4. Proposed solutions were truly out-of-the-box.

There were few things desperate Dust Bowl residents didn't try to make it rain. Some followed the old folklore of killing snakes and hanging them belly-up on fences. Others tried shock and awe. Farmers in one Texas town paid a self-professed rainmaker $500 to fire off rockets carrying an explosive mixture of dynamite and nitroglycerine to induce showers. Corporations also touted their products to the federal government as possible solutions. Sisalkraft proposed covering the farms with waterproof paper, while a New Jersey asphalt company suggested paving the Plains.

5. A newspaper reporter gave the Dust Bowl its name.

Associated Press reporter Robert Geiger opened his April 15, 1935, dispatch with this line: "Three little words achingly familiar on a Western farmer's tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent-if it rains." "Dust bowl" was probably a throwaway line for Geiger, since two days later he referred to the disaster zone as the "dust belt." Nevertheless, within weeks the term had entered the national lexicon.

6. Dust storms crackled with powerful static electricity.

So much static electricity built up between the ground and airborne dust that blue flames leaped from barbed wire fences and well-wishers shaking hands could generate a spark so powerful it could knock them to the ground. Since static electricity could short out engines and car radios, motorists driving through dust storms dragged chains from the back of their automobiles to ground their cars.

7. The swirling dust proved deadly.

Those who inhaled the airborne prairie dust suffered coughing spasms, shortness of breath, asthma, bronchitis and influenza. Much like miners, Dust Bowl residents exhibited signs of silicosis from breathing in the extremely fine silt particulates, which had high silica content. Dust pneumonia, called the "brown plague," killed hundreds and was particularly lethal for infants, children and the elderly.

8. The federal government paid farmers to plow under fields and butcher livestock.

As part of Roosevelt's New Deal, the federal government purchased starving livestock for at least $1 a head. Livestock healthy enough to be butchered could fetch as much as $16 a head, with the meat used to feed homeless people living in Hoovervilles. The Soil Conservation Service, established in 1935, paid farmers to leave fields idle, employ land management techniques such as crop rotation and replant native prairie grasses. The federal government also bought more than 10 million acres and converted them to grasslands, some managed today by the U.S. Forest Service.

9. Most farm families did not flee the Dust Bowl.

John Steinbeck's story of migrating tenant farmers in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1939 novel, "The Grapes of Wrath," tends to obscure the fact that upwards of three-quarters of farmers in the Dust Bowl stayed put. Dust Bowl refugees did not flood California. Only 16,000 of the 1.2 million migrants to California during the 1930s came from the drought-stricken region. Most Dust Bowl refugees tended to move only to neighboring states.

10. Few "Okies" were actually from Oklahoma.

While farm families migrating to California during the 1930s, like the fictitious Joad family, were often derided as "Okies," only one-fifth of them were actually from Oklahoma. (Plus, many of those Oklahoma migrants were from the eastern part of the state outside of the Dust Bowl.) "Okie" was a blanket term used to describe all agricultural migrants, no matter their home states. They were greeted with hostility and signs such as one in a California diner that read: "Okies and dogs not allowed inside."

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10 Things You May Not Know About the Dust Bowl

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While "black blizzards" constantly menaced Plains states in the 1930s, a massive dust storm 2 miles high traveled 2,000 miles before hitting the East Coast on May 11, 1934. For five hours, a fog of prairie dirt enshrouded landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and the U.S.

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This Article goes into great depth about the dust bowl. For example they cover all the areas it affected where it started and when it ended. They also looked into why it happened and explained the reason for the dust bowl.

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Dust Bowl, name for both the drought period in the Great Plains that lasted from 1930 to 1936 and the section of the Great Plains of the United States that extended over southeastern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and northeastern New Mexico.

The term Dust Bowl was suggested by conditions that struck the region in the early 1930s. The area's grasslands had supported mostly stock raising until World War I, when millions of acres were put under the plow in order to grow wheat. Following years of overcultivation and generally poor land management in the 1920s, the region-which receives an average rainfall of less than 20 inches (500 mm) in a typical year-suffered a severe drought in the early 1930s that lasted several years. The region's exposed topsoil, robbed of the anchoring water-retaining roots of its native grasses, was carried off by heavy spring winds. "Black blizzards" of windblown soil blocked out the sun and piled the dirt in drifts. Occasionally the dust storms swept completely across the country to the East Coast. Present-day studies estimate that some 1.2 billion tons (nearly 1.1 billion metric tons) of soil were lost across 100 million acres (about 156,000 square miles [405,000 square km]) of the Great Plains between 1934 and 1935, the drought's most severe period.

Thousands of families were forced to leave the Dust Bowl at the height of the Great Depression in the early and mid-1930s. Many of these displaced people (frequently collectively labeled "Okies" regardless of whether they were Oklahomans) undertook the long trek to California. Their plight was characterized in songs such as "Dust Bowl Refugee" and "Do Re Mi" by folksinger Woody Guthrie, an Oklahoman who had joined the parade of those headed west in search of work. That experience was perhaps most famously depicted in John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

The wind erosion was gradually halted with federal aid. Windbreaks known as shelterbelts-swaths of trees that protect soil and crops from wind-were planted, and much of the grassland was restored. By the early 1940s the area had largely recovered.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica John P. Rafferty.

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Dust Bowl | Definition, Duration, Map, & Facts

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Dust Bowl, both the drought period lasting from 1930 to 1936 in the U.S. Great Plains and the part of the Great Plains where overcultivation and drought resulted in the erosion of topsoil, which was carried off in windblown dust storms forcing thousands of families to leave the region during the Great Depression.

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This Political Cartoon shows how the dust bowl and the drought that was going on at the time was ignored. In the cartoon a man is putting a do not disturb sign in front of where the drought is. So the reason he is doing this is so no one will pay attention and this crisis will be ignored.

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This Map Shows the dust storm damage through the years. It shows that the dust bowl states were Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. It Also shows that other areas while they werent dust bowl states they were also damaged by the Dust bowl. Then there is the red spot in the middle of all the dust bowl states and that is where the dust bowl did the most damage.

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In This poem titled Rain or dust the writer explains how each day is and explains how bad the dust storms are. The writer says sometimes the day is pleasant but then proceeds to say but then “A dark dust cloud will come up just at night”. So this writer is explaining how each day goes by during the dust bowl and explains the ups and downs of it.

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This painting of what the dust bowl was like shows the devastation that it caused. In this picture half of a house is consumed by dust and what appears to have been a farm is completely covered in dust. So people lost their farms and houses which destroyed some people's lives so this painting shows the devastation the dust bowl caused.

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This photograph shows what the dust bowl was like. In this photograph the dust is bigger than trees and houses so you're able to see just how massive these dust storms were. It also shows that these houses and buildings get consumed by the dust so people might not be able to go outside until the dust subsides.

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This video is called uncovering the dust bowl and it is by cbs. In the video Ken Burns and and Dayton Duncan break down the dust bowl and what it was like.