Frederick M. Brown/GETTY IMAGES

Ken Burns, 59, has been chronicling America’s history on film for three decades. Weaving archival photographs and footage with oral history, he has directed and produced documentaries on epic subjects for PBS—notably The Civil War, Baseball and Jazz. His latest opus is The Dust Bowl, a four-hour film to be released on DVD following its two-night PBS premiere Nov. 18 and 19. It documents the worst man-made ecological catastrophe in American history. It was caused by the “Great Plow-up,” an industrial wheat-farming boom that tore up the arid grasslands of the Great Plains. Turned to dust by drought, millions of acres of America’s breadbasket blew away in killer storms during the 1930s, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Burns’s film mixes images of horrific devastation with interviews with elderly Americans who were children during the Dust Bowl. They tell of “black blizzards” that charged over the horizon like moving mountain ranges. The dust storms buried barns, suffocated animals and children, and caused fatal “dust pneumonia.” Continue…