Brad D. Lookingbill is an assistant professor of history and director of the honors program at Columbia College in Missouri. He has published articles, encyclopedia entries, and book reviews on the American West and environmental history.
Listed in: American History
Dust Bowl, USA
Depression America and the Ecological Imagination, 1929–1941
By Brad D. Lookingbill
Whether romantic or tragic, accounts of the dramatic events surrounding the North American Dust Bowl of the “dirty thirties” unearthed anxieties buried deep in America’s ecological imagination. Moreover, the images of a landscape of fear remain embedded in the national consciousness today. In vivid form, the aesthetic of suffering captured in Dorothea Lange’s photographs and Woody Guthrie’s folk songs created the myths and memories of the Depression generation.Dust
