Description: Far from being a record of southern failure, Lakwete concludes, the cotton gin--correctly understood--supplies evidence that the slave labor-based antebellum South innovated, industrialized, and modernized.
Brief description: Angela Lakwete is an associate professor of history at Auburn University.
Review Quotes: Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which created the Old South and then destroyed it . . . Lakwete targets this myth in Inventing the Cotton Gin and largely demolishes it.
--John Bezís-Selfa, Alabama Review