dustbowl

• dust bowl

dust +‎ bowl

dustbowl (plural dustbowls)

1. An area which abounds in dust and which is very dry.
   • 1986, Sub-Saharan Africa Report - Issues 94-100, page 59:

     Concepts like reform, sanctions or KwaNatal indabas have little meaning in this dustbowl, which is host to more than a million people relocated from "white" farms and "black spots" in Natal, apart from the hundreds of thousands who lived there before the removals started here in the Sixties.

   • 2011, Ram Govardhan, Rough with the Smooth, →ISBN:

     The moment they were unleashed the dogs reached the Hindu graveyard in quick time, and then reached the abandoned hockey playground, now a dustbowl, and from there they ran straight to Pandi's thatched hut and circled it twice.

   • 2014, Joseph O'Connor, The Thrill of it All, →ISBN:

     Taking up space in the dustbowl of his bedroom was a Marshall JCM 800 bass amplifier.

2. The central region of the United States during the 1930s.
   • 1940, United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Education and Labor, Violations of free speech and rights of labor, page 21892:

     Because of this general situation, namely, the factor that thousands of citizens in California because of evictions and suspension of income were forced to move into squatter camps, and that these squatter camps were to some extent used by the state and county for the purpose of segregating the destitute unemployed, many such communities were actually in existence in California by 1933 when the dustbowl influx began to make itself felt in this state.

   • 2004, James Chapman, Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present, →ISBN:

     It was not until the end of the decade that Hollywood could take a more detached look at the social consequences of the Depression in John Ford's 1940 film of John Steinbeck's dustbowl novel The Grapes of Wrath.

   • 2011, Mark Slobin, Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction, →ISBN, page 109:

     It's a long way from earlier circuits, such as Woody Guthrie's dustbowl odyssey and Pete Seeger's union halls.

   • 2012, G. Thomas-Lycklama-Nijeholt, On the Road for Work: Migratory Workers on the East Coast of the United States, →ISBN:

     When the dustbowl refugees from Arkansas and Oklahoma moved to California, job opportunities for the one million Mexicans who had crossed the border decreased, and about half of these workers returned to their country (Shotwell 1961:74).

3. The 1930s period.