Trusted Writing on History, Travel, Food and Culture Since 1949
Great Plains
In the 1930’s, “black blizzards” eroded a 97-million-acre section of the Great Plains, which an AP reporter casually but appropriately termed the “Dust Bowl.” The name stuck. Another Dust Bowl is not inevitable, but it is possible.
The sunlight began to dim hours before sunset and the clean, fresh air acquired a peculiar density as a giant, black dust cloud approached from the northwest. Read more >>
The Middle West has put its stamp on many artists’ work
It is a big country, sprawling all the way from the Alleghenies to the Rockies, and it puts its mark on the people who live in it. Its climate tends to be uncompromising— baking heat in the summer, hostile cold in the winter—and it has never done anything by halves. Where it had forests, they rolled for hundreds of miles, great stands of hardwood, green twilight under their branches; its open prairies were like the sea itself, rolling west in an unbroken treeless groundswell. Read more >>