Dust Bowl Exhibit: Black Wind Blowing
The Dust Bowl of the American Great Plains is the starting point for John Steinbeck's 1939 classic The Grapes of Wrath, which has been the focus of this year’s New Student Reading Project at Cornell. An exhibit at Mann Library highlights the agroecological factors behind the Dust Bowl and the birth of U.S. soil conservation programs that this environmental catastrophe engendered. Below, select photos archived at the Library of Congress present photography commissioned by the federally funded Farm Security Administration in the 1930s to document the life conditions of the rural poor in the U.S. and the Dust Bowl’s devastating effects on the farming communities of Oklahoma, Texas and other Great Plains states. Mann's exhibit, "Black Wind Blowing," will be on display on the first floor of the library through February 2010.