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NOW IS A CRITICAL TIME TO ACT. The Senate is voting to eliminate Public Media funding.

Reaping the Whirlwind

Season 1 Episode 2 | 1hr 55m 45s

Black Sunday was only halfway through the decade-long crisis. The storms continued. The Great Depression still affected people. Government programs were instituted to help. Learn what FDR’s administration did to try to keep the southern Plains from becoming a North American Sahara desert. Find out why some residents finally decided they had to give up and move somewhere else and how some held on.

Aired: 11/18/12
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
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
Meet some of the people who lived in the Great Plains.
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The southern Plains were rapidly turned from grasslands to wheat fields.