Dust Bowl—the term given to the area of the Great Plains that was most greatly affected during the Great Drought of the 1930’s 6.
Q. What was the name given to the day in October of 1929 when the stock market crashed?
Black Thursday is the name given to Thursday, October 24, 1929, when panicked investors sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging 11% at the open in very heavy volume.
Q. What was the name of the areas of wood and crate shacks during the Great Depression?
The term was coined by Charles Michelson, publicity chief of the Democratic National Committee. There were hundreds of Hoovervilles across the country during the 1930s and hundreds of thousands of people lived in these slums.
Q. What name was given to newspapers used as bedding?
Hooverville. They were bitingly named after Herbert Hoover, then President of the United States, because he had allegedly allowed the nation to slide into depression. Democrats coined other terms, such as “Hoover blanket” (old newspaper used as blanketing) and “Hoover flag” (an empty pocket turned inside out).
Q. What were the homeless called?
As the Depression worsened and millions of urban and rural families lost their jobs and depleted their savings, they also lost their homes. Desperate for shelter, homeless citizens built shantytowns in and around cities across the nation. These camps came to be called Hoovervilles, after the president.
Q. What factors led to the Dust Bowl?
What circumstances conspired to cause the Dust Bowl? Economic depression coupled with extended drought, unusually high temperatures, poor agricultural practices and the resulting wind erosion all contributed to making the Dust Bowl. The seeds of the Dust Bowl may have been sowed during the early 1920s.
Q. Could the Dust Bowl be prevented?
The Dust Bowl is a distant memory, but the odds of such a drought happening again are increasing. Other helpful techniques include planting more drought-resistant strains of corn and wheat; leaving crop residue on the fields to cover the soil; and planting trees to break the wind.
Q. What did the Dust Bowl do to farmers?
The massive dust storms caused farmers to lose their livelihoods and their homes. Deflation from the Depression aggravated the plight of Dust Bowl farmers. Prices for the crops they could grow fell below subsistence levels. In 1932, the federal government sent aid to the drought-affected states.
Q. Where did the farmers go during the Dust Bowl?
In the 1930s, farmers from the Midwestern Dust Bowl states, especially Oklahoma and Arkansas, began to move to California; 250,000 arrived by 1940, including a third who moved into the San Joaquin Valley, which had a 1930 population of 540,000. During the 1930s, some 2.5 million people left the Plains states.
Q. What prices fell during the Great Depression?
The Great Depression Prices dropped an average of ten percent every year between the years of 1930 and 1933.
