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Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. By Angela Lakwete. Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, c. 2003. Pp. xvi, 232. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-7394-0.)
Few objects in American history carry more emotional baggage than the cotton gin. Nineteenth-century historians heralded it as a breakthrough that helped set in motion the expansion of chattel slavery in the South and quickened the industrialization of the North. They focused their gaze on the story of Eli Whitney, the Yale-educated tutor who encountered cotton during his stay at Mulberry Grove plantation outside Savannah, Georgia, invented the cotton gin, and went on to revolutionize the manufacture of firearms and northern industrial history by promoting the concept of interchangeable parts. The gin rendered slave-grown...