This museum interprets cotton agriculture in Arkansas from statehood in 1836 through World War II, when agricultural practices quickly became mechanized. Visitors can tour the restored 1920s cotton gin and see how cotton was grown, picked, and processed.
The museum offers exhibits, tours, educational programs, and occasional recreational and educational events.
The Cane River Creole National Park contains Oakland and Magnolia Plantations. Oakland Plantation, dating to circa 1821, was the home of Jean Pierre Emmanuel Prud'homme. The structure is French Colonial in style with bousillage construction. Magnolia Plantation was built in the 1830s for Ambrose LeComte. Styles include Greek Revival and Italianate. Collection highlights include the last U.S. cotton gin with a wooden screw press located on its original site.
Both plantations offer ranger-led tours, self-guided tours, painting workshops, musicians, storytellers, craftsmen, Junior Ranger activities, and picnic sites. The website offers videos and historic photographs.
The Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site is located on Tuskegee University. Sights include the George W. Carver (circa 1864-1943) Museum and The Oaks, Booker T. Washington's (1856-1915) home. Other figures honored include Dr. Frederick W. Patterson (1901-1988), founder of the United Negro College Fund, and Dr. Robert Moton, who stressed the need for health care for African American veterans. Carver is known for his support of the peanut as an alternative to the southern cotton crop, which had been ravaged by the boll weevil. Washington founded the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, later the Tuskegee Institute, to provide education to African American students. Due to the strength of the aeronautical engineering program at the institute, the site was selected by the military to train African American pilots for World War II.
The site offers exhibits, interpretive programs, 30-minute introductory films on George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington, guided tours of The Oaks, period rooms, tours of the historic Tuskegee University, and 2-hour curriculum-based programs. Reservations are required for curriculum-based programs. The Oaks is not fully wheelchair accessible. Films can be played with captions.
Was economic difference—manufacturing in the North and slave-driven agriculture in the South—the primary cause of the Civil War?
Textbooks have traditionally taught that incompatibility between northern and southern economies caused the Civil War. Everything else was tied to that economic difference, anchored by cotton.
Census data from 1860 shows farms, manufacturing, and cities in the North and the South, as well as the location of slaves and cotton in southern states, all of which challenge the notion of a purely agricultural South and industrialized North.
The Civil War was fought for many reasons, not solely or even primarily because of the growing importance of cotton on southern farms. Moving away from economic differences and cotton as simplistic causes leads to a more accurate, and far more interesting, understanding of the causes of the Civil War.
For years, textbook authors have contended that economic difference between North and South was the primary cause of the Civil War. The northern economy relied on manufacturing and the agricultural southern economy depended on the production of cotton. The desire of southerners for unpaid workers to pick the valuable cotton strengthened their need for slavery. The industrial revolution in the North did not require slave labor and so people there opposed it. The clash brought on the war.
Economic divergence is certainly one of the reasons for the Civil War, but neither the major one nor the only one. Many factors brought about the war. Focusing only on different economies would be like arguing that one professional football team will always win because it has taller players.
The true causes of the Civil War are downright intriguing and just as complex as the conflict itself.
Yale University has made a sampling of their courses available for listeners, viewers, and readers.
As of writing, the history subsection contains six courses—two of which relate directly to U.S. history ("The American Revolution" and "The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877") and one which touches on relevant issues, "Epidemics and Western Society Since 1600." Each of these courses offers links to individual pages for each lecture. Lecture pages contain short text overviews of the topic at hand; a list of any reading which was required for the day; and links to lecture audio, video, and transcriptions.
Our site links you directly to the Yale's history courses. However, consider exploring other topics as well. Maybe a lecture on Roman architecture will give you background for discussing monuments in Washington, DC, or an economics course will give you a new way of thinking about the American Revolution. Interdisciplinary possibilities are endless.
The 371-acre Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site preserves the cotton plantation of Daniel Turnbull, one of the richest men in the nation during his lifetime. The 1835 plantation home still contains many of its original furnishings. The site also includes extensive gardens, a doctor's office, and a barn, as well as 10 other historic structures.
The site offers tours, period rooms, educational programs, gardens, and a picnic area.
Liendo Plantation was founded in 1853 as one of the earliest cotton plantations in Texas. Union officer George A. Custer (1839-1876) was stationed at the plantation toward the end of the Civil War; and the site was home to sculptor Elisabet Ney (1833-1907) and her husband between 1873 and 1911. The site also houses a Detering Red Brahman cow breeding program, and hosts an annual Civil War weekend.
The plantation offers guided tours and period rooms. Reservations are required for group tours. Boxed lunches are available. Please contact the plantation for more information.
Slater Mill is a museum complex dedicated to bringing one of the most exciting and significant periods of American history to life. Visitors to the site experience a time when an America of small farmers and craftsmen was poised to become the industrial leader of the world. In the Slater Mill itself, visitors are surrounded by vintage textile machinery bathed in the light of large windows. With expert commentary from costumed interpreters they can imagine the lives of the people—many of them children—who made the early mills come alive.
In the nearby Wilkinson Mill they can feel the throb of the great 16,000-pound mill wheel, a replica of the original wheel that harnessed the power of the Blackstone River to make the era's finest tools. Children get up close and personal with early production processes as they provide the power and operate miniature machinery in the Apprentice Alcove. In the Sylvanus Brown House they can look back to a time when spinning, weaving, cooking, and quilting were the stuff of everyday life.
The site offers a short film, exhibits, tours, demonstrations, workshops, educational programs, and occasional recreational and educational events (including living history events).
From the Mercer University:
"The southern studies faculty of Mercer University will host an NEH institute for high school teachers on Cotton Culture in the U.S. South, 1865-1965.
The institute will allow twenty-two teachers of English, history, economics, government, geography, art, and music to learn about the complex social structures of the U.S. South in the crucial yet frequently misunderstood hundred years after the Civil War, a period that included both major social problems and amazing cultural development. An interdisciplinary panel of experts on the South will use the cultivation of cotton—the South's most significant economic product during this time—as a means to analyze and understand the region's history, geography, economics, politics, culture, and literature . . .
Macon, Georgia, about an hour's drive south of Atlanta, is an ideal location from which to study the history and culture of cotton. Nicknamed 'the market city,' it was once a center of cotton commerce and textile production. Workshops will meet on the campus of Mercer University in downtown Macon, and participants will also visit a nineteenth-century plantation, a working cotton farm, the Civil Rights historic district of Atlanta, and the cotton seaport in Savannah."
This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the superior resources and infrastructure of the North, which helped it overpower the South in the Civil War, even though the South had the home turf advantage.
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