Surprisingly unexpected, this narrative by Cronin does not fit his own definition of a narrative. I don\u2019t care about the Dust Bowl now more than prior to reading his essay. Cronin did, however, provide a compelling account of the scholarship attributed to the Dust Bowl. Within this account, Cronin formulates and sheds light on arguments made regarding this period as well as history as a whole. He uses these varying accounts about the same traumatic event ask an age-old historical question, \u201chow [do] two competent authors looking at identical materials drawn from the same past reach such divergent conclusions?\u201d He further emphasizes that their conclusions are different because the stories they tell are different. I disagree with Cronin\u2019s assertion that this is difficult to comprehend. Everyone obtains different biases from their varying experiences. As Cronin later explains, historians pick and choose the information they use to prove their point. In Cronin\u2019s words, narratives \u201cinevitably sanctions some voices while silencing others.\u201d He eventually comes to these conclusions, but it takes him too long to arrive there in my humble opinion.<\/p>\n

Cronin does convince me that the Dust Bowl can be categorized as a Gilded Age Disaster. Previously I thought the Gilded Age ended when the progressive era began prior to World War 1. The Dust Bowl showed that humans need to recognize and accept the limits of nature rather than strive to overcome them. The failure of this struggle epitomizes the Gilded Age. Consistently humans try to \u201ccheat the system\u201d by over-producing, over-working, and over-consuming all while negating common sense for safety and proper production methods.<\/p>\n

I enjoyed Cronin\u2019s tie in with the political culture of the period. The propaganda film that we watched by Pare Lorentz emphasized the \u201cnaturalness\u201d of the Dust Bowl and the benefit of the government. Characterizing the environmental conditions as \u201cinevitable\u201d truly takes blame away from the farmers and the government. Lorentz\u2019s film, in Cronin\u2019s words, conveys how government interfusion of \u201ctechnology, education, cooperation, and state power would…avert tragedy.\u201d Cronin pits Lorentz\u2019s work against the more recent scholarship of Paul Bonnifield that views the government intervention as detrimental to the recovery process. Bonnifield claims that it was \u201cthe people who lived there not government scientists, who invented new land-use practices that solved earlier problems.\u201d I think there\u2019s a happy medium between these two conclusions. The government scientists had many more resources at their disposal and were able to work in a less eminent environment while the farmers obtained the hands on experience.<\/p>\n

I’m going to agree with Wells<\/a> here, sorry Dan. I think the emotionless, strictly factual based history does very little to advance our society. Often we write history and remember history to effect (or affect? I’ll never know) our future. Without the emotional pull, history is dry and almost meaningless. It’s the individual stories and the sympathetic nature humans crave that brings history alive and establishes its meaning. There’s a huge difference in reading how the Nazis in WWII used killing squads to eradicate Jews from Poland killing thousands of men, women, and children; and reading a specific story of one of these families where one member survived (boy, that escalated quickly). I think we read facts or figures and say, “wow, that’s a lot of people. That’s terrible.” But when we can associate the facts with much more intricate detail that we can sympathize with (a family’s struggles, for example), then history becomes much more meaningful.<\/p>\n

And I leave you all with this:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Surprisingly unexpected, this narrative by Cronin does not fit his own definition of a narrative. I don\u2019t care about the Dust Bowl now more than prior to reading his essay. Cronin did, however, provide a compelling account of the scholarship attributed to the Dust Bowl. Within this account, Cronin formulates and sheds light on arguments … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “History-the art of storytelling”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[84,123,288],"class_list":["post-762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cronin","tag-dust-bowl","tag-narrative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":811,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762\/revisions\/811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his254-spring2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}