The dust storms start rolling into the southern Great Plains.

Learn about what caused "The Great Plow Up" and the slogan "Wheat Will Win the War."

Trixie Travis Brown Talks About Black Sunday.

Trixie Travis Brown Talks About Almost Moving to Idaho.

The stock market crashed on what came to be called Black Tuesday. In response to the lower wheat prices more wheat was planted.

Trixie Travis Brown talks about her father moving to Follett, TX.

Trixie Travis Brown Talks About Dust Storms.

Trixie Travis Brown Talks About Sunday After Church.

Trixie Travis Brown Talks About Housekeeping.

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.”

More hope came to the dust bowl after a snowstorm hit the Great Plains.

Some people were arrested on the CA border for not having enough money.

Woody Guthrie moves to Los Angeles in the second half of the 1930s and supports himself with odd jobs. He finally gets a radio show of his own and a newspaper column called “Woody Sez” and gains a reputation as a radical for sympathizing with the migrants.

Meet some of the people who lived in the Great Plains and learn a little about the area. The Dust Bowl airs on PBS Nov 18 & 19, 2012.

The Dust Bowl was a decade-long natural catastrophe of biblical proportions and the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history. It is the classic tale of humans pushing too hard on nature and nature pushing back during a period of economic boom and bust in the 1920s and 1930s.

As the Great Depression sets in, farmers on the Great Plains begin to feel its effects. A combination of natural and made-made factors begins to turn the profitable farming land into a vast wasteland. The effect of these factors on individuals and families is documented.

Modern machinery made farming more profitable and changed the structure of the land for growing wheat. The result was more land speculation, more acreage turned over to wheat farming, and a blind faith that the good times wouldn’t end, but warning signs were evident.

Social worker Dorothy Williamson describes her experiences talking with victims of the Dust Bowl. What help there was came from Washington, D.C., with programs such as the CCC, NYA, or WPA.

In the summer of 1936, Roosevelt takes a whistle-stop tour across the Midwest and Northern Plains to see the crisis himself. He inspires enthusiastic, but weary, audiences. At the same time, Hugh Bennett, head of the Soil Conservation Service, begins instituting his program of agricultural reform and offering incentives to those farmers who will adopt the new farming methods.

In 1935, 850 million acres of topsoil are swept off the Great Plains, with more dust storms to come. President Franklin Roosevelt’s inner circle does not want the area to turn into an “Arabian Desert.”