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Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. By Angela Lakwete. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xiii + 232 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $45. ISBN: 0-801-87394-0.
As somebody who regularly teaches an introductory survey of U.S. history, I have five different textbooks sitting on my office bookshelf. Each book reports the same basic story: in 1793, the northern-born, Yale-educated Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin while visiting a Georgia plantation. Only after Whitney's invention, the standard interpretation goes, could cotton production flourish in the South. I have unthinkingly repeated the standard interpretation myself in countless undergraduate lectures. The thesis of Angela Lakwete's Inventing the Cotton Gin is that the textbooks and my lectures are dead wrong. She persuasively argues that Eli Whitney did not invent the cotton gin, and that such simplistic accounts of his inventive greatness rest upon a series of longstanding historical myths designed to trumpet Yankee ingenuity and downplay the industrial genius of the slave South.
Lakwete shows in the first chapter that cotton gins had been used for hundreds of years in China, India, and the Mediterranean. In the United States, various inventors experimented with different designs in the late colonial and revolutionary periods. By 1790, gins in the United States and the...