美国Cotton文化介绍：Cotton Facts.doc

Cotton Facts Before 1793, it was impossible to make much money on cotton because the seeds had to be picked out by hand. So not many people grew it. But in 1793, just after the American Revolution, Eli Whitney invented a new machine called a cotton gin that could get the seeds out of cotton. Soon everybody in Georgia was growing cotton and using the new cotton gin to get the seeds out cheaply. Tens of thousands of African people were captured and brought to the United States to work in the cotton fields to grow more and more cotton. Most of the people who came to the United States as slaves came around 1800, and they came to pick cotton. “Cotton Fields is a song written by Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly), an American folk and blues musician. He was born in 1888 and died in December, 1949. Texarkana - When surveyors first surveyed the land they thought that the city would be on the border of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, so they named it TEX ARK ANA. The song mentions that the fields are down in Louisiana, just about a mile from Texarkana. As it turned out, this is impossible because Texarkana ended up begin about 20 miles north of the Louisiana border. The issue of slavery was also greatly impacted by the invention of the cotton gin. Prior to this invention, slavery had become less favorable with Americans. Because of the huge numbers of new immigrants to the United States, labor had become cheap enough that many farmers found it necessary to pay. Suddenly, as the gin made dramatically improved ways to produce cotton, the need for labor was made more imperative to the livelihood of those who grew the crop. Larger and larger fields of cotton were needed to keep up with demand; along with the increased production of the crop was the need for laborers to glean it. The influx of immigrants to America had produced many more laborers for such a task, but these peoples were reluctant to undertake such terrible and difficult work; they could find easier a