September 2 classwork

This week, I learned about the dynamics of the cotton industry. It all revolved around money. Changes were implemented in the system when those changes would positively impact people financially. For example, the invention of the spinning jenny allowed thread to be made much more quickly. This drove the invention of the mechanical loom. The mechanical loom was able to weave much more quickly than a person could, and did not have to be paid. The cotton gin came next, which sped up cotton cleaning by 50x. This meant that there was only one slow step controlling the rate of production: the rate at which cotton could be picked. This was increased by forcing the slaves to use both hands while picking, the use of record keeping to hold the slaves to a high standard, and the use of brutal force to "encourage" the slaves to work faster. This resulted in a 5x increase in speed. While the labor was res, there was no incentive to build a machine to automate cotton picking, so cotton remained hand picked until 1930 when a mechanical cotton picker was invented. We know all of these things because of records that were kept. There are journal entries, letters, and mass produced slave labor tracking books that survive from those times that can be used to figure out what happened and why. Evidence must be taken with a grain of salt however. Individual pieces of evidence provide knowledge of only a limited area or group of people. Spurious conclusions can be drawn if knowledge based on a small sample size is used to extrapolate the behavior of a larger group.