The story of the farmers who came to the Southern Plains of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas dreaming of prosperity, and lived through ten years of drought, dust, disease and death.
Bam White, the father of Melt White, was the unlikely star of a classic documentary about the Dust Bowl by filmmaker Pare Lorenz. Earning a month’s wages in two hours, White had no idea what the film was about. “The Plow that Broke the Plains” was a propaganda film promoting the New Deal’s agricultural reforms. White played the original farmer who plowed the Great Plains, breaking the pristine ground with the farming techniques that would lead to the disaster of the Dust Bowl.
Lorenz had wanted to create a series of government documentaries covering the full range of American life. He presented his idea to Rexford Guy Tugwell, Director of the Resettlement Administration, which would later become the Farm Security Administration. Tugwell had already planned creating an extensive photographic record of the agency’s work and those affected by it, so he was very receptive to the idea of using film to educate the public. Under his program, photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Arthur Siskind and Marian Post Wolcott would produce an archive of more than a quarter of a million photographs depicting life during the Great Depression.
Drawn by images of the Great Plains, Lorenz and Tugwell agreed that the first subject would be the Dust Bowl. “The Plow that Broke the Plains,” completed in 1936, was a propaganda film promoting the New Deal’s agricultural reforms. Lorenz had hoped to have the thirty-minute film distributed as a short by a major film studio, but studios, also hit hard by the Depression, were playing it safe by shying away from controversial subjects, focusing instead on Shirley Temple films, period dramas, and screwball comedies. The film was shown at a few independent theaters and received some critical success.
The epic battle waged over dinosaur fossils by rival paleontologists in the American West.
High on a granite cliff in South Dakota's Black Hills tower the huge carved faces of four American presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.
The inspiring story of the modern environmental movement.
In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded from New Orleans to Illinois, leaving a million people homeless and leading to a major black migration to the North.
The most daring and innovative accomplishment at the turn of the 20th century.
The 300-year saga of the American whaling industry.
When an earthen dam broke without warning, a small city in Pennsylvania was swept away in a wall of water over 30 feet high.
President Theodore Roosevelt was caught in the middle of the first major battle for wilderness preservation in Yosemite National Park.
