Menu
Idea

cotton production

69
Filter by:

Filter by published date

People working in fields, figures in an account book, and a copy of the Guardian newspaper.

Guardian Owner Apologises for Founders’ Links to Transatlantic Slavery

Scott Trust to invest in decade-long programme of restorative justice after academic research into newspaper’s origins.
by David Olusoga via The Guardian on March 28, 2023
A roll of cotton thread in the shape of an eye.

Slavery and the Guardian: The Ties That Bind Us

There is an illusion at the centre of British history that conceals the role of slavery in building the nation. Here’s how I fell for it.
by David Olusoga via The Guardian on March 28, 2023
"Under My Wings Every Thing Prospers" by New Orleans artist J. L. Bouqueto de Woiseri, 1803, depicting an eagle flying over a port city and agricultural fields.

Slavery's Revolutions In Louisiana

Comparing the results of two Louisiana slave rebellions 20 years apart and what that meant for the continuation of slavery within the Deep South.
by Patrick Luck via Age of Revolutions on June 27, 2022

‘The Lehman Trilogy’ and Wall Street’s Debt to Slavery

If the play holds up a mirror to our moment, it is by registering slavery in a peripheral glance only to look away.
by Sarah Churchwell via New York Review of Books on June 11, 2019
A line of prisoners picking cotton in Huntsville, Texas.

The Oil Boom’s Roots in East Texas Cotton Farming

Oil’s rise was as dependent on the old as much as the new. The industry also benefited from changes in agriculture.
by Scot McFarlane via Texas Monthly on November 1, 2017
Conservative protesters hold signs and flags at a Tea Party protest.

Lone Star Futures

Texas might have been a place to start a conversation about widening the scope of civil liberties, but it has also been a place where those liberties end.
by Emma Pask via Public Books on June 19, 2025
A group of indigenous Pacific Islanders forced to work on a sugar plantation, with a white overseer in the background.

How ‘Blackbirders’ Forced Tens of Thousands of Pacific Islanders Into Slavery After the Civil War

The decline of Southern industries paved the way for plantations in Fiji and Australia, where victims of “blackbirding” endured horrific working conditions.
by Shoshi Parks via Smithsonian on December 5, 2024
Crowded and brightly-lit Beale Street in Memphis.

Memphis: The Roots of Rock in the Land of the Mississippians

Rising on the lands of an ancient agricultural system, Memphis has a long history of negotiating social conflict and change while singing the blues.
by Rob Crossan via JSTOR Daily on October 18, 2024
Illustration of the Georgia Peach.

The Georgia Peach: A Labor History

The peach industry represented a new, scientifically driven economy for Georgia, but it also depended on the rhythms and racial stereotypes of cotton farming.
by Livia Gershon via JSTOR Daily on July 1, 2024
Election Day in Philadelphia, John Lewis Krimmel.

A More Imperfect Union: How Differing National Visions Divided the North and the South

On the fragile facade of republicanism in 19th century America.
by Alan Taylor via Literary Hub on May 21, 2024
Boiling House at the Sugar Plantation Asunción, Cuba, 1857.

Slavery Was Crucial for the Development of Capitalism

Historian Robin Blackburn has completed a trilogy of books that provide a comprehensive Marxist account of slavery in the New World.
by Robin Blackburn, Owen Dowling via Jacobin on April 10, 2024
Black and white men, women, and children listening to a speaker at a Southern Tenant Farmers Union meeting.

When Black and White Tenant Farmers Joined Together to Take on the Plantation South

The Southern Tenant Farmers Union was founded on the principle of interracial organizing.
by David Griscom via Jacobin on December 5, 2023
Donellia Chives, a trustee of Penn Center.

White Gold from Black Hands: The Gullah Geechee Fight for a Legacy after Slavery

Descendants of the west Africans who picked the cotton that made Manchester rich are struggling to keep their distinct culture alive.
by DeNeen L. Brown via The Guardian on March 30, 2023
Newspaper lithograph of people fleeing the yellow fever epidemic on a boat in Mississippi.

The Sick Society

The story of a regional ruling class that struck a devil’s bargain with disease, going beyond negligence to cultivate semi-annual yellow fever epidemics.
by Malcolm Harris, Kathryn Olivarius via n+1 on September 2, 2022
Painting of a plantation.

The Old South Shall Rise Again

On the economic system of Silicon Valley.
by Victor Davis Hanson via The New Criterion on August 24, 2022
Statue of Stonewall Jackson, on its side in slings and propped up by tires, in front of its graffiti-covered pedestal.

What the 1619 Project Got Wrong

It erases the fact that, for the first 70 years of its existence, the US was roiled by intense, escalating conflict over slavery – a conflict only resolved by civil war.
by James Oakes via Catalyst on December 17, 2021
Drawing of people picking cotton at a plantation

A Few Random Thoughts on Capitalism and Slavery

Historian James Oakes offers a critique of the New History of Capitalism.
by James Oakes via The Economic Historian on September 28, 2020
Galveston Central Wharf in 1861

Granger’s Juneteenth Orders and the Limiting of Freedom

To what extent did the Union general's famous orders actually liberate the enslaved in Texas?
by Edward S. Alexander via Emerging Civil War on June 23, 2020
African-American cowboys in Bonham, Texas, circa 1913

The Real Texas

What is Texas? Should we even think about so large and diverse a place as having an essence that can be distilled?
by Annette Gordon-Reed via New York Review of Books on October 24, 2019

The Boycott’s Abolitionist Roots

How a group of 19th-century Quakers cut their economic ties to slavery.
by Willy Blackmore via The Nation on August 14, 2019
African American sharecropping children in a field with bags of cotton.
partner

The Perils of Big Data: How Crunching Numbers Can Lead to Moral Blunders

As history shows, efficiency without ethics can be catastrophic.
by Caitlin C. Rosenthal via Made By History on February 18, 2019
Camel.

The Dark Underbelly of Jefferson Davis's Camels

How the U.S. Army's antebellum camel experimentation paved the way for the illicit trafficking of enslaved Africans.
by Michael E. Woods via Muster on November 21, 2017

Introducing Reconstruction

The new Slate Academy finds the seeds of our present politics in the period after the Civil War.
by Jamelle Bouie, Rebecca Onion via Slate on October 27, 2017

The Alamo: The First and Last Confederate Monument?

The Alamo supposedly honors the courage of Anglos pitted against Mexican brutality. In fact, it is about slavery and emancipation.
by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra via Arcade on September 18, 2017
Vintage Georgia postcard.

The Un-Pretty History Of Georgia's Iconic Peach

Why are Georgia peaches so iconic? The answer has a lot to do with slavery — its end and a need for the South to rebrand itself.
by Tove Danovich via NPR on July 21, 2017

To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice

What if we use the history of slavery as a standpoint from which to rethink our notion of justice today?
by Walter Johnson via Boston Review on October 19, 2016
Black family sitting around log cabin, possibly in Florida, 1892.

Plantations Practiced Modern Management

Slaveholding plantations of the 19th century used scientific management techniques—and some applied them more extensively than factories.
by Caitlin C. Rosenthal, Scott Berinato via Harvard Business Review on September 1, 2013
A political cartoon of Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland emptying the U.S. treasury.

Radical Tariffs Aren’t New, But They Have Been Disastrous

An American story.
by Scott Reynolds Nelson via Perspectives on History on April 14, 2025

The Second Abolition

Robin Blackburn’s sweeping history of slavery and freedom in the 19th century.
by Manisha Sinha via The Nation on November 19, 2024
An 1863 illustration from “Le Monde illustré” of formerly enslaved people celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation.

What If Reconstruction Didn’t End Till 1920?

Historian Manisha Sinha argues that the Second Republic lasted decades longer than most histories state and achieved wider gains.
by Eric Herschthal via The New Republic on June 11, 2024
View More
30 of
69

Filter Results:

Suggested Filters:

Idea

Person

brought to you by
© Bunk History