Cotton Kingdom


Book Description

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is best known for designing parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, and the grounds of the Capitol in Washington. But before he embarked upon his career as the nation's foremost landscape architect, he was a correspondent for theNew York Times, and it was under its auspices that he journeyed through the slave states in the 1850s. His day-by-day observations--including intimate accounts of the daily lives of masters and slaves, the operation of the plantation system, and the pernicious effects of slavery on all classes of society, black and white--were largely collected in The Cotton Kingdom. Published in 1861, just as the Southern states were storming out of the Union, it has been hailed ever since as singularly fair and authentic, an unparalleled account of America's "peculiar institution."




River of Dark Dreams


Book Description

River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War.




Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom


Book Description

In Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom Robert Gudmestad offers new insights into the remarkable and significant history of transportation and commerce in the antebellum South. He examines the wide-ranging influence of steamboats on the Southern economy. From carrying cash crops to market, to contributing to slave productivity, increasing the flexibility of labor, and connecting southerners to overlapping orbits of regional, national, and international markets, steamboats not only benefitted slaveholders and northern industries but also affected cotton production.




The Cotton Kingdom


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Necropolis


Book Description

Introduction: A rising necropolis -- Patriotic fever -- Danse macabre -- Immunocapital -- Public health, private acclimation -- Denial, delusion, and disunion -- Incumbent arrogance -- Epilogue: Fever and folly.




The Cotton Kingdom


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The Cotton Kingdom


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Selections from The Cotton Kingdom by Frederick Law Olmsted


Book Description

Although Frederick Law Olmsted is best remembered as a premier landscape architect, it is The Cotton Kingdom that historians regard as an equally significant part of his legacy. In this volume, John C. Inscoe makes Olmsted’s classic work accessible to student audiences for the first time. The Introduction places Olmsted’s personal history in the broader context of sectional conflict, and the selections are organized chronologically and geographically to reveal the extent of Olmsted’s travels and his appreciation of the multiplicity of the antebellum Southern experience. A chronology, questions to consider, and bibliography enrich students’ understanding of the conflicts over slavery in the critical decade of the 1850s.




Empire of Cotton


Book Description

WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE • A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. “Masterly … An astonishing achievement.” —The New York Times The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism.