Ken Burns asks, "Can the Dust Bowl happen again?"

The Dust Bowl companion book released

THE DUST BOWL: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY 

In this riveting chronicle, which accompanies a documentary to be broadcast on PBS in the fall, Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns capture the profound drama of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. 

Terrifying photographs of mile-high dust storms, along with firsthand accounts by more than two dozen eyewitnesses, bring to life this heart-wrenching catastrophe, when a combination of drought, wind, and poor farming practices turned millions of acres of the Great Plains into a wasteland, killing crops and livestock, threatening the lives of small children, burying homesteaders' hopes under huge dunes of dirt.

 Burns and Duncan collected more than 300 mesmerizing photographs, some never before published, scoured private letters, government reports, and newspaper articles, and conducted in-depth interviews to produce a document that may likely be the last recorded testimony of the generation who lived through this defining decade.

LINK

Amarillo Museum of Art hosts Dust Bowl era photos

Dust and Depression: Farm Security Administration Photographs from the 1930s October 3 - December 9, 2012

Dust and Depression: Farm Security Administration Photographs from the 1930s takes viewers on a journey back to a time of historic economic crises, when Americans experienced dire financial crises due to the 1929 Wall Street crash and record draughts that crippled the nation’s agricultural production.

Sixty black-and-white images from the museum’s permanent collection feature works by nationally renowned photographers John Collier, Jr., Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn.

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was one of several federally-funded New Deal economic programs enacted during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency to provide relief to the economically disadvantaged, support economic recovery, and reform the financial system behind the Depression.

Part of the Historic division of FSA, the photography project not only created a “visual encyclopedia of American life” but also through mass media outlets like magazines and newspaper informed the public about the plight of fellow citizens nationwide and often facilitated government action to address their needs.

Memories of Black Sunday - on KACV tonight at 8:00 PM

Dust Bowl echo - Abandoned farm SE Colorado

click to enlarge 

(C) Steve Douglass All rights reserved

Sneak Peek: The Dust Bowl ...

Worst Hard Time author Timothy Egan to lecture in Amarillo.

Timothy Egan (born November 8, 1954 in Seattle, Washington) is an American author and journalist. For The Worst Hard Time, a 2006 book about people who lived through The Great Depression's Dust Bowl, he won the National Book Award for Nonfiction^[2][3] and the Washington State Book Award in history/biography.

Quoting Egan: "The story of the people who lived through the nation's hardest economic depression and its worst weather event is one of the great untold stories of the Greatest Generation. To me, there was an urgency to get this story now because the last of the people who lived through those dark years are in their final days. It's their story, and I didn't want them to take this narrative of horror and persistence to the grave. At the same time, this part of America - the rural counties of the Great Plains - looks like it's dying. Our rural past seems so distant, like Dorothy's Kansas in the Wizard of Oz. Yet it was within the lifetime of people living today that nearly one in three Americans worked on a farm. Now, the site of the old Dust Bowl - which covers parts of five states - is largely devoid of young families and emptying out by the day. It's flyover country to most Americans. But it holds this remarkable tale that should be a larger part of our shared national story." 

Egan will be giving a free lecture at the Amarillo Civic Center Heritage Room on October, 11 at 7:00 PM.