Dust Bowl
Ploughed prairies turn to desert and farmers flee west
Drought and the ploughing of prairies without soil protection turned the Great Plains into a desert; dust storms blotted out the sun and carried dust to the Atlantic. Hundreds of thousands of farmers fled west, as Steinbeck told in The Grapes of Wrath.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1914–1918 World War I — 16 years earlier
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 12 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 9 years later
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 17 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 18 years later
Europe
- 1919 Treaty of Versailles — 11 years earlier
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 2 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 3 years later
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 6 years later
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — 11 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1917 October Revolution — 13 years earlier
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 1 year earlier
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 6 years later
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 11 years later
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 12 years later
Middle East
- 1908 Oil struck at Masjed Soleyman — 22 years earlier
- 1915 Armenian genocide — 15 years earlier
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 14 years earlier
- 1916–1918 The Arab Revolt — 14 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 2 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 8 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 5 years later
Asia
- 1923 Great Kantō earthquake — 7 years earlier
- 1931 China floods — 1 year later
- 1934–1935 Long March — 4 years later
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 15 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 23 years later
Oceania
- 1911 Amundsen reaches the South Pole — 19 years earlier
- 1912 The death of Scott's polar party — 18 years earlier
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 6 years later
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 11 years later
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 12 years later
Alive at the time
- Thomas Edison (aged 83)
- Nikola Tesla (aged 74)
- Marie Curie (aged 63)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 61)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 59)
- Winston Churchill (aged 56)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 52)
- Albert Einstein (aged 51)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 49)
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (aged 49)