Dust Bowl Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

Bonnifield, Matthew Paul. The Dust Bowl: Men Dirt and Depression. University of New Mexico Press, 1979.

A journalist named Robert Geiger first coined the term Dust Bowl in the 1930s, which was a decade of extreme droughts, blizzards, tornadoes, dust storms and other climatic changes. Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Kansas and other Plains states bore the brunt of this drought, and Dr. Bonnifield lived through it at the time. This region of the country was highly arid and semi-desert even at the best of times, and had undergone a big speculative boom in wheat farming during World War I and the 1920s. When the drought began in 1930, coinciding with the Great Depression, these events caught the Plains farmers completely unaware and unprepared. Many went bankrupt and abandoned their farms, turning into migrant workers and economic refugees on the West Coast. Huge dust storms that continued...
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