1930s farming practices turned the American prairie into storms that buried towns in dust

Deep plowing had stripped the Great Plains of the native grasses holding its topsoil in place. When a severe drought hit in the 1930s, the exposed soil lifted into towering 'black blizzards' that rolled for hundreds of miles and blacked out the sun. Hundreds of thousands of families abandoned the region in one of America's largest internal migrations.

— Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl — National Book Award for Nonfiction, 2006
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