Dust Bowl Devastates Plains: 350 Million Tons of Dirt
A massive dust storm on May 11, 1934, hurled 350 million tons of soil from the Great Plains to New York and Atlanta, blanketing cities in semi-darkness and bringing commerce to a halt. This catastrophic event confirmed the Dust Bowl as a decade-long disaster that devastated farming communities and prolonged the Great Depression by destroying livelihoods across the region.
May 11, 1934
92 years ago
Key Figures & Places
What Else Happened on May 11
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The monk Wang Jie paid for the printing out of his own pocket, commissioning woodblock carvers to cut the entire Buddhist text in reverse — 16 feet of paper, ev…
The woodblocks took months to carve, each character cut in reverse by hand. Wang Jie paid for the whole thing—a 16-foot scroll of Buddhist scripture—as a gift f…
The new Byzantine Emperor was seven years old. Alexander had spent his entire childhood as co-emperor alongside his older brother Leo VI, never expecting to ru…
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