Birthplace of The Cotton Empire
Georgia also figures significantly in the history of American slavery because of Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793. It was first demonstrated to an audience on Revolutionary War hero Gen. Nathanael Greene's plantation, near Savannah. The cotton gin's invention led both to the explosion of cotton as a cash crop as well as to the revitalization of African slavery in the Southern United States, which soon became dependent upon the growth and sale of cotton to manufacturers in the Northern United States and abroad.
Read more about this topic: History Of Slavery In Georgia (U.S. State)
Famous quotes containing the words birthplace, cotton and/or empire:
“In most nineteenth-century cities, both large and small, more than 50 percent—and often up to 75 percent—of the residents in any given year were no longer there ten years later. People born in the twentieth century are much more likely to live near their birthplace than were people born in the nineteenth century.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“The “paper tiger” hero, James Bond, offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves, is saying what many whites want desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the White Man, lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet.”
—Eldridge Cleaver (b. 1935)