A highly visual and accessible look at the Dust Bowl recounts the way the drought and dust storms in the southern Great Plains during the Depression profoundly affected lives and, eventually, national policy. Martin Sandler looks at this time and place in U.S. history through photographs organized around specific events or aspects of the Dust Bowl tragedy and its aftermath. Each two-page spread features a dramatic full-page photo and one or more smaller pictures accompanied by Sandler’s narrative examining various aspects of the crisis. While some of the photographic captions could have been better, the pictures are effective with or without words. Indeed, Sandler explains, the pictures played a critical role in drawing attention to the Dust Bowl across the country and confirmed the power of photography as a “universal language.” (Age 11 and older)

The Dust Bowl was a time of hardship and environmental and economic disaster. More than 100 million acres of land had turned to dust, causing hundreds of thousands of people to seek new homes and opportunities thousands of miles away, while millions more chose to stay and battle nature to save their land.

FDR's army of photographers took to the roads to document this national crisis. Their pictures spoke a thousand words, and a new form of storytelling- photojournalism-was born. With the help of iconic photographs from Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and many more, Martin Sandler tells the story of a nation as it endured its darkest days and the extraordinary courage and spirit of those who survived.