Skip to content
You are not logged in |Login  
     
Limit search to available items
Record:   Prev Next
Resources
More Information
Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Dattel, Eugene R.

Title Cotton and race in the making of America : the human costs of economic power / Gene Dattel.

Publication Info. Chicago : Ivan R. Dee, 2009.

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xiv, 416 pages) : illustrations
data file
Bibliography
Physical Medium polychrome
Contents pt. 1: Slavery in the making of the Constitution. The silent issue at the Constitutional Convention -- pt. 2: The engine of American growth, 1787-1861. Birth of an obsession -- Land expansion and white migration to the Old Southwest -- The movement of slaves to the cotton states -- The business of cotton -- The roots of war -- pt. 3: The north: for whites only, 1800-1865. Being free and black in the North -- The colonial North -- Race moves west -- Tocqueville on slavery, race, and money in America -- pt. 4: King Cotton buys a war. Cultivating a crop, cultivating a strategy -- Great Britain and the Civil War -- Cotton and Confederate finance -- Procuring arms -- Cotton trading in the United States -- Cotton and the freedman -- pt. 5: The racial divide and cotton labor, 1865-1930. New era, old problems -- Ruling the freedmen in the cotton fields -- Reconstruction meets reality -- The black hand on the cotton boll -- From cotton field to urban ghetto : the Chicago experience -- pt. 6: Cotton without slaves, 1865-1930. King Cotton expands -- The controlling laws of cotton finance -- The delta plantation : labor and land -- The planter experience in the twentieth century -- The long-awaited mechanical cotton picker -- The abdication of King Cotton.
Summary "For more than 130 years, from the early nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, cotton was the leading export crop of the United States. And the connection between cotton and the African-American experience became central to the history of the republic. America's most serious social tragedy, slavery and its legacy, spread only where cotton could be grown. Both before and after the Civil War, and well into the twentieth century, blacks were relegated to work the cotton fields. Their social and economic situation was aggravated by a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion that caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South. Gene Dattel's pioneering study explores the historical roots of these central social issues. In telling detail, Mr. Dattel shows why the vastly underappreciated story of cotton is a key to understanding America's rise to economic power. When cotton production exploded to satiate the nineteenth-century textile industry's enormous appetite, it became the first truly complex global business and a driving force in U.S. territorial expansion and sectional economic integration. It propelled New York City to commercial preeminence and fostered independent trade between Europe and the United States, providing export capital for the new nation to gain its financial "sea legs." And without slave-produced cotton, the South could never have initiated the Civil War, America's bloodiest conflict. Cotton continued to exert a powerful influence on both the American economy and race relations in the years after the Civil War. Mr. Dattel's skillful historical analysis identifies the commercial forces that cotton unleashed and the pervasive nature of racial antipathy it produced. This is a story that has never been told in quite the same way before, related here with the authority of a historian with a profound knowledge of international finance."--Publisher's description.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 373-397) and index.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Slavery -- Economic aspects -- Southern States -- History.
Slavery -- Economic aspects.
Southern States.
History.
Slavery.
Cotton growing -- Economic aspects -- Southern States -- History.
Cotton growing -- Economic aspects.
Cotton growing.
Cotton growing -- Social aspects -- Southern States -- History.
Cotton growing -- Social aspects.
Plantation life -- Southern States -- History.
Plantation life.
African Americans -- Southern States -- Social conditions.
African Americans.
Social conditions.
United States -- Race relations.
United States.
Race relations.
United States -- Economic conditions.
Economic conditions.
Slavery -- Political aspects -- United States.
Slavery -- Political aspects.
United States -- Politics and government -- 1783-1865.
Politics and government.
Chronological Term 1783-1865
Subject United States -- Politics and government -- 1865-1933.
Chronological Term 1865-1933
1783-1933
Genre/Form Electronic books.
History.
Other Form: Print version: Dattel, Eugene R. Cotton and race in the making of America. Chicago : Ivan R. Dee, 2009 9781566637473 (DLC) 2009001342 (OCoLC)300462565
ISBN 9781442210196 (electronic book)
1442210192 (electronic book)
9781566637473
1566637473