The worst hard time
by Timothy Egan · first published 2005
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"The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people who held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzar
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…west. Topsoils are also far poorer than further east. There was an experiment conducted some years ago on dryland farming. It ended poorly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time is an excellent telling of this: https://books.google.com/books?id=np1RwDQfpjsC&pg=PP1#v=onep...
on “Civilizational Collapse, Part 4” ↗…grew more wheat. This compounded the supply problem. Eventually, as wheat piled up at railroad depots unable to be sold, farmers left the plowed prairie fallow and the topsoil blew away. Source: The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan
on “Drowning in grain: historically high supplies and low prices” ↗In a very different vein, I have read a number of books recently that feature a surprising amount of "scam and schemes": - The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, about the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. A lot of people were scammed into settling the high plains by railroad salesmanship and other "real estate" scams. - The Indifferent…
on “My favorite nonfiction books about cults, scams, and schemes” ↗