With the gin (short for engine), raw cotton could be quickly cleaned; Suddenly cotton became a profitable crop, transforming the southern economy and changing the dynamics of slavery. The first ...

What made cotton so desirable? In the 1790s Americas oldest crops, like tobacco, were depleting farmland and dropping in value. At the same time, the textile industry in Great Britain was ...

The gin made cotton profitable which was a boon to the south, but did manage to keep slavery going for another seven decades — that wasn’t Witney’s intent, of course. The service model ...

Eli Whitney does not own slaves according to any historical evidence. His parents failed to provide him with enough money to support his education as a young man. Whitney created an improved ...

While the mass production of the gin eliminated the laborious task of hand-picking the seeds out, it actually increased the plantation owners' use of slavery. The result was that cotton growing became ...

Many of the Creoles of color were descended from slaves and went on to acquire wealth and become ... Soon, cotton took over, and at the end of the 18th century, the invention of the cotton gin made ...

UPDATE: This story has been updated with comments from the family’s attorney. When a 13-year-old came home from school and showed her mother the bag of cotton she had received from a teacher ...

When a 13-year-old came home from school and showed her mother the bag of cotton she had received from a teacher, her mother ...