Summary Of James Gregory's American Exodus

James Gregory’s, American Exodus, is a book that focuses on Dust Bowl migration to California, and their economic and social struggles in California. The book first starts off setting up the historical context of the Dust Bowl and the migrants with statistics, maps, pictures, and migrant backgrounds in the introduction. The overall book reads like a history textbook on the Dust Bowl, which is divided into two parts instead of narrative based on one family like The Grapes of Wrath. The first part of the book is organized chronologically, focusing on the resettlement of the Dust Bowlers, and the second part is done thematically and focuses on Okie culture. Gregory’s approach successfully showed the clash of cultures and social struggles the migrants faced in California accurately without having to caricaturize the migrants. The overall approach tries to show that the migrants were of many different background and experiences, and argues against the hillbilly portrayal of the migrants. Gregory’s book is a general survey of the Dust Bowl migration that challenges the previous portrayals of this event, and tries to provide an objective portrayal of them. The central theme of the book focuses around the Okie experience with discrimination from the local Californians. Gregory brings up how many migrants came with a …show more content…
However, the book read too much like a history book and much of it was lost on me since it jumped through too many different testimonies’ too quickly. The discussion that interested me the most was on the overall racism in the Okie culture, even though many experienced similar discrimination, but Gregory did not delve too much into it. The book would have been more interesting if it explored more into that culture’s hypocrisy, and if it focused on a handful of families’ experiences rather than jumping all over the place in the same