In the book, The Came Before Columbus by Ivan van Sertina, it was stated "The American cotton has an African ancestor" which explained how people traveled to survive based on cotton. This statement is the exact example why the study of plants is necessary, in reference to cotton. Is is important to know the plants origin to understand they type of environment the need to thrive in, and how the plant functions can help humans use the plant. Plants help with almost everything, we use them for our food, medicine, and cosmetics. As scientist are learning more about plants, the world can thrive more with the help of plants since some are essential to
The crops started many years ago, with the switch grass, which is now made for bundling and farm feed, with out the switch grass we may not have the dairy and poultry we have today. Making sure our animals are fed well, is and important thing for the people and the communities. Cotton is another big thing Mississippi has started. Without cotton we would not have the comfortable cloths we wear today, and the towels we dry off with and the pillows and the blankets we sleep with at night, cotton is also used for many medical reason such as gauze for after surgery, and to keep the medicines fresh such as ibuprofen. I am proud to say that cotton is playing an even greater role in our every day lives.
First of all, The United States was out in search for rich soil to plant many fields of cotton.
Columbus appears to be a dreamer. His goals were selfish and his true knowledge weak. He was deceitful and egotistical and knew how to manipulate others. Throughout his writings he refers to the things that ‘he’ accomplished, as if he had done them alone. He lied almost daily to the sailors according to his journal when he stated “less than the true number” (Halsall) of leagues travelled each day was reported to them. He spoke of an abundance of gold he found in the islands when he wrote “the majority [of rivers]…contain gold” (Belasco and Johnson 82). According to his journal entries, he only observes the existence of gold two times and both times it is seen hanging from a man’s nose. For example, on October 17 he encounters a man that had “hanging at his nose a piece of gold half as big as a castellailo” (Halsall), about a half pound in weight. Although he was told about gold and searched for gold, he never procured any. Additionally, he had a very high opinion of himself and was not hesitant in letting others know this. In his initial Journal writing he announces himself to be “Don” (Halsall), that’s like saying ‘I’m the head man.’ Furthermore, he let the King and Queen know that his proclaimed distinction was to be passed to his oldest son, including governorship of islands and lands he finds on his journey. He appears to think that what once belonged to native islanders, will belonged to him.
Christopher Columbus is a mythical hero or in other words, not a true hero. The story of Christopher Columbus is part of the many myths of Western civilization. Also the story of Christopher Columbus represents the power of those that are privileged and in most cases white European men that have written this mythical history. Zinn (2009 exposes the truth about Columbus through eyes of the people who were there when he had arrived which were the Native Indians (p.481). Columbus had kept a personal journal for his voyage to describe the people and the journey. What was evident throughout his journal was the Native Americans were very nice, gentle and kind hearted people (Zinn, 2009, 481). As Zinn suggests Columbus spoke of the Native Americans as” they are the best people in the world and
In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, which started a huge push by European nations to gain power and wealth, mainly in the way of building Empires in the New World. This was called the Age of Exploration and lasted from the late 15th to the early 17th century. Spain, under King Ferdinand II of Aragon, was the first nation to do this. Juan Ponce de León was a conquistador and one of the earlier voyagers to the New World in the European Age of Exploration, he accomplished several notable things in his life, but overall and looking in hindsight he is seen as a failure when compared to other conquistadors.
Thesis: What happened after Columbus arrived in Hispaniola (modern day Haiti and Dominican Republic)? So many people still assume that Christopher Columbus was a hero, whether they know if that’s true or not. They think that he was a man that cannot be forgotten. What humans in the 21st century have forgotten is that Columbus was a nasty man. He was very cruel, especially after his arrival at Haiti, on December 5th 1492, with three ships, the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria (“Taino Conquest” Latin American Studies). Of course, Columbus had always thought he had reached the East Indies in Asia, due to his underestimation of the size of the world’s vast seas. What he didn’t know was that there was no way he would reach Asia without a half dead and starving crew.
Tobacco cultivation: Tobacco was a poor man’s crop, it could be planted easily, it produced commercially marketable leaves within a year, and it required only simple processing.
3. Dutch, Engish, and French longed to permanently live family life in the New World.
The development of the most beneficial technology in the Old South that we all know as the cotton gin was developed by Yale graduate Eli Whitney in the year 1793. This took place shortly after his relocation from Massachusetts to Georgia when it was brought to his attention from his former manager that harvesting cotton was both time consuming and unbeneficial to plantation owners. As a result, he was then asked to develop a resolution for support; thus the cotton gin was born. This extraordinary machine had the ability to separate cotton from its seeds through hand cranking. The acquisition of the cotton gin was the fact that cotton evolved into the most economically beneficial crop in the Old South. This became the primary reason for the use of the slogan “King Cotton”.
Cotton was an extremely labor-intensive crop that requires hours of manual labor to harvest and many more in preparation for spinning. Many Americans looked for ways to improve this process and make it faster, however it was not until the American Industrial Revolution came about that great steps were made in this process. When the American Industrial Revolution hit, it brought about a major change and was arguably one of the greatest factors in the modernization of the United States. Along with this Industrial Revolution came a great invention in the world of cotton which many historians argue sparked the revolution itself. Eli Whitney brought a revolution to cotton production when he invented the cotton gin. This machine quickly separated the cotton seeds from the cotton and allowed it to be processed at rates up to twenty times faster than before. The cotton production in the U.S. and its annual yield had been relatively low before the invention of the cotton gin, but after its introduction annual cotton production soared to all-time highs. Along with the cotton gin, large mills and metal tools vastly enhanced the production of cotton in the 1800’s. The production of cotton was primarily centered on its export to Europe and these new technologies produced a new age of production in New England and created a vast domestic market for southern cotton farmers. This European cotton trade produced a strong market that supported many southern states. Europeans were the primary source in turning this raw cotton into textiles through the African cotton trade. “Europeans also learned that the African trade could be integrated within a wider space of exchange that encompassed the entire Atlantic. This was called ‘triangular trade’ in which raw materials (cotton) were traded from the Americas to Europe, where they served to manufacture and print cotton textiles. These textiles were then in turn sold on international
...th a nearly challenging obstacle. They produced too little cotton to be able to cover the costs of shipping it to a processing plant, most likely in the North or England, their primary consumers. Within ten years, cotton became the main crop in the south. In 1790, before the invention of the cotton gin, about 3000 bales of cotton were produced in the United States. Ten years later 100000 thousands bales were produced.
Some of the problems when studying history are the texts and documents that have been discovered are only from perspective. Furthermore, on occasion that one perspective is all there may be for historians to study. A good example of this textual imbalance can be found from the texts about the discovery of the New World; more specifically, the letters of Christopher Columbus and Pêro Vaz de Caminha during their voyages to the New World. Plenty of the text from this time is written from the perspective of the Europeans, as the Indigenous population did not have any written text. What this means is that it provided only one perspective, which can drastically hinder how history is interpreted. Columbus’s letter of his first voyage to the Caribbean
The invention of the cotton gin made growing cotton practical, and cotton began dominating the growing fields. Cotton was a crop that could be grown almost anywhere because it seemed to need only the land to grow in. Land that was once left empty because of poor growth capabilities was planted in the lucrative crop of cotton. Growing cotton allowed farmers to grow crops in fields that previously had to rest for a season. The southern farmers were able to realize a profit thanks to Eli’s labor and time saving machine.
Before the land of what we no class Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and other countries in the middle east grains, such as wheat and wild barley, could be seen growing in the wild without human hand to cultivate and nurture it (Authors 2007). Over time, humans began to recognize the benefit of the plants and began the first signs of human agriculture. The skill of farming took time and trial and error, but along the way, humans began to settle down to tend to their crops. Though the first crops were nothing more than seed s thrown about without rhyme or reason to the process we know today such as fields having, rows and sorting out the seeds to create a higher yield each harvest (Authors 2007). Because of the trial and error process, agriculture of plants did not take place of a short period but took many, many years to evolve to what we know today as agriculture; the new fa...
Still, cotton stands alone as the most utilized fiber crop plant used around the world. Also known as "King Cotton," in the United States, it was the major force behind the institution of the American age of slavery, and cotton prevailed as the economic source for the southern states of the United States and its antebellum prosperity before the civil war. It holds an important place in America's past, present, and future. Cotton is truly the "Fabric of Our Lives".