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Okies

Season 1 | 6m 20s

Woody Guthrie sings “I Ain’t Got No Home” and talks of how the migrant families traveling to California inspired him. The immigrant population explodes in California as thousands of people move there to find work and a better life. Those from the Dust Bowl, whether they are from Oklahoma or not, are called “Okies.”

Funding is provided by Bank of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, National Endowment for the Humanities, The Rockefeller Foundation, Wallace Genetic Foundation and members of The Better Angels Society, including the Dana A. Hamel Family Charitable Trust and Robert and Beverly Grappone.
Extras
The storms and the Great Depression continued.
Experience the conservation efforts to bring farms back to life
Modern machinery made wheat farming more efficient and profitable.
Ken Burns, Dayton Duncan, Julie Dunfey and Susan Shumaker talk about making The Dust Bowl.
With the dust storms, midday turned into midnight.
Those caught in the dust thought the end of the world was upon them.
Feel the full force of the worst manmade environmental disaster in America’s history.
FDR tours the Dust Bowl.
The dust storms were so severe they could suffocate those trapped out of doors.
The Dust Bowl chronicles the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history
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The storms and the Great Depression continued.
The southern Plains were rapidly turned from grasslands to wheat fields.