Cotton and Race in the Making of America

Cotton and Race in the Making of America PDF

Author: Gene Dattel

Publisher: Government Institutes

Published: 2009-09-16

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1442210192

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Since the earliest days of colonial America, the relationship between cotton and the African-American experience has been 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, blacks were assigned to the cotton fields while a pervasive racial animosity and fear of a black migratory invasion caused white Northerners to contain blacks in the South. Gene Dattel's pioneering study explores the historical roots of these most 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 thereby a major 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" in the world economy. Without slave-produced cotton, the South could never have initiated the Civil War, America's bloodiest conflict at home. 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 the history of international finance. With 23 black-and-white illustrations.

Cotton and Race in the Making of America

Cotton and Race in the Making of America PDF

Author: Eugene R. Dattel

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781566639682

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"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.

Reckoning with Race

Reckoning with Race PDF

Author: Gene Dattel

Publisher: Encounter Books

Published: 2017-09-19

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1594039100

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Reckoning with Race confronts America's most intractable problem—race. The book outlines in a provocative, novel manner American racial issues from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. It explodes myths about the South as America's exclusive racial scapegoat. The book moves to the Great Migration north and the urban ghettos which still plague America. Importantly, the evergreen topics of identity, assimilation, and separation come to the fore in a balanced, uncompromising, and unflinching narrative. People, cities, and regions are profiled. Despite civil rights legislation, the racial divide between the races remains a chasm. A plethora of reports, commissions, conferences, and other highly visible gestures, purporting to do something have generated publicity, but little else. There remain no adequate structures—family, community or church—to provide leadership. Destructive cultural traits cannot be explained solely by poverty. The book asks and answers many questions. After emancipation, how were blacks historically segregated from the rest of American society? Why is self-segregation still a feature of black society? Why do large numbers of blacks resist assimilation and the acceptance of middle class norms of behavior? Why has there been so little black penetration in the private sector? Why did the removal of overt legal segregation and civil rights legislation in the 1960s not settle the racial conundrum? What are the differences and similarities between the leaders of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and today? Why do we still have the problems enumerated in the Kerner Commission report (1968) after trillions of dollars have been spent promote black progress? What, if anything, should be done, to eliminate the racial divide?

Black Hands, White House

Black Hands, White House PDF

Author: Renee K. Harrison

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1506474683

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Black Hands, White House documents and appraises the role enslaved women and men played in building the US, both its physical and its fiscal infrastructure. The book highlights the material commodities produced by enslaved communities during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. These commodities--namely tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton, among others--enriched European and US economies; contributed to the material and monetary wealth of the nation's founding fathers, other early European immigrants, and their descendants; and bolstered the wealth of present-day companies founded during the American slave era. Critical to this study are also examples of enslaved laborers' role in building Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and George Washington's Mount Vernon. Subsequently, their labor also constructed the nation's capital city, Federal City (later renamed Washington, DC), its seats of governance--the White House and US Capitol--and other federal sites and memorials. Given the enslaved community's contribution to the US, this work questions the absence of memorials on the National Mall that honor enslaved, Black-bodied people. Harrison argues that such monuments are necessary to redress the nation's historical disregard of Black people and America's role in their forced migration, violent subjugation, and free labor. The erection of monuments commissioned by the US government would publicly demonstrate the government's admission of the US's historical role in slavery and human-harm, and acknowledgment of the karmic debt owed to these first Black-bodied builders of America. Black Hands, White House appeals to those interested in exploring how nation-building and selective memory, American patriotism and hypocrisy, racial superiority and mythmaking are embedded in US origins and monuments, as well as in other memorials throughout the transatlantic European world. Such a study is necessary, as it adds significantly to the burgeoning and in-depth conversation on racial disparity, race relations, history-making, reparations, and monument erection and removal.

Stamped from the Beginning

Stamped from the Beginning PDF

Author: Ibram X. Kendi

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Published: 2016-04-12

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13: 1568584644

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The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America -- it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis. As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities. In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope.

Cotton and Race Across the Atlantic

Cotton and Race Across the Atlantic PDF

Author: Jonathan Robins

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1580465676

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The story of how African farmers, African-American scientists, and British businessmen struggled to turn colonial Africa into a major cotton exporter.

Remembering Emmett Till

Remembering Emmett Till PDF

Author: Dave Tell

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-02-15

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 022655967X

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Take a drive through the Mississippi Delta today and you’ll find a landscape dotted with memorials to major figures and events from the civil rights movement. Perhaps the most chilling are those devoted to the murder of Emmett Till, a tragedy of hate and injustice that became a beacon in the fight for racial equality. The ways this event is remembered have been fraught from the beginning, revealing currents of controversy, patronage, and racism lurking just behind the placid facades of historical markers. In Remembering Emmett Till, Dave Tell gives us five accounts of the commemoration of this infamous crime. In a development no one could have foreseen, Till’s murder—one of the darkest moments in the region’s history—has become an economic driver for the Delta. Historical tourism has transformed seemingly innocuous places like bridges, boat landings, gas stations, and riverbeds into sites of racial politics, reminders of the still-unsettled question of how best to remember the victim of this heinous crime. Tell builds an insightful and persuasive case for how these memorials have altered the Delta’s physical and cultural landscape, drawing potent connections between the dawn of the civil rights era and our own moment of renewed fire for racial justice.

The Consequences of Cotton in Antebellum America

The Consequences of Cotton in Antebellum America PDF

Author: William J. Phalen

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-04-02

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1476614903

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In 1846, political economist Karl Marx wrote that "without cotton, you have no modern industry." Indeed, before the American Civil War, cotton brought wealth, power and prosperity to both America and Europe. Giant industries in the northern U.S., extensive shipping networks up and down the Atlantic Coast and to Europe, new inventions and revised applications of old machines--all sprang from the success of King Cotton. This thoughtful study traces the impact of southern cotton on most of the important facets of life in antebellum America, including employment, international relations, agriculture, shipping, the U.S. economy, Native American relations, and the subjugation of humans. This one plant fashioned the way of life of the South and profoundly affected the destiny of the entire American people.

The Rise and Triumph of Methodism

The Rise and Triumph of Methodism PDF

Author: L Alfred Jenkins

Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.

Published: 2023-05-30

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1638858306

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This book tells the story of how American democracy and early Wesleyan Methodism wed. It is the story not of the institutional church but of a concept fathered by John Wesley and American democracy--egalitarian universalism. Anytime something new appears, it needs an engine to push it along. Francis Asbury, his circuit riders, America's early poets, and the Black slaves became that engine. This book will show how egalitarian universalism, as defined by the New Testament, became the concept that guided the development of America's new democracy. The book will also show how this revolutionary concept was squeezed when the Civil War rushed in. Had it not been for the gospel writer and his Luke-Acts, American democracy and Methodism might have been forever lost.