Lesson Title: Ideas and Commodities Cross Cultural Regions

Name: Carolyn Triebel

Discipline: History, Visual Arts

School: Albert Einstein High School, Montgomery County, MD

Grade Level/Content Focus: This lesson is appropriate for United States history classes, grades 9-12. It focuses on the importance of cotton during the United States Civil War and the period of Reconstruction that followed. This lesson provides an informal introduction to the class textbook by analyzing visuals, paintings, charts, graphs, and tables throughout the book.

Time Period: One 90-minute block

Maryland Content Standards and Core Learning Goals:

Students will use thinking processes and skills to gain knowledge of history, geography, economics, and political systems (1.1). They will do this by:

• evaluating information from primary sources (1.1.12.3);
• using a variety of geographic tools to collect, synthesize, interpret, analyze, and evaluate information to answer geographic questions in the context of other social sciences (1.1.12.4);
• analyzing how change happens at different rates and at different times; how some aspects can change while others remain the same; how change is complicated and affects not only technology, economics, and politics, but also values and beliefs (1.1.12.5).

Students will explain how the lives of people in the United States were affected by changes in industry and transportation, increasing immigration in the North, the rapid expansion of slavery in the South, and westward movement (2.7). They will do this by:

• evaluating the influence of industrialization and technological developments, including the factory system, and analyzing how it affected gender roles and changed the lives of men, women and children (2.7.8.2).

Students will demonstrate an understanding of the causes, course, and character of the Civil War and its effect on the people of the United States (2.9). They will do this by:

• analyzing the economic and philosophical differences between the North and South (2.9.12.2);
• analyzing the enduring effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the relationships between individuals and groups (2.10.12.3);
• evaluating the economic and social problems that faced the South in general and African Americans in particular (2.10.12.4);
• describing significant innovations in technology that changed the quality of life and transformed agriculture, mining and ranching (2.11.12.2).

Specific Objectives:
The students will be able to:

• locate and label landmasses and bodies of water on a world map;
• analyze and interpret visual information, such as art works, charts, graphs, political cartoons, maps, and diagrams;
• compare and contrast how cotton, native to India (c.700 B.C.E.), impacted the economies of the North and South in the U.S. as well as in France and Great Britain;
• create a pantoum (a Malayan poem) using information learned in class about the importance of cotton on cultures.

Materials/Resources:

Books:

Rivoli, Pietra. The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist
Examines the Markets, Power and Politics of World Trade. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley
& Sons, 2005.

Harris, Jennifer. Textiles: 5,000 Years: An International History and Illustrated Survey.
Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers,1993.

Clayton, Andrew, Elizabeth Perry, Linda Reed, and Allan Winkler. America: Pathways to the
Present. Prentice Hall, 2005.

Web Resources:

http://www.invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/whole_cloth
• Clear concise writing on the impact of early industrialization on the cotton industry in the South and the early textile mills in the Northeast

http://www.groveart.com
• Discussion of cotton, imports, and European manufacture

http://www.pcga.org/cotton
• Discussion of the production of cotton and how it impacted the plantation system of the South

Overheads:

World Cotton Production by Region and Time
1791-1860: Asia, Latin America, Africa, India, U.S., and other areas

How to Create a Pantoum
A Malayan poem made up of quatrains, with the second and fourth lines of one quatrain recurring as the first and third lines of the next, and with the first and third lines of the first quatrain recurring as the second and fourth lines of the last

Worksheets:

A black-and-white map of the world for students to make lines and color on

Lesson Components:

Motivation/Warm-Up:

• Think, Pair, Share: Students will brainstorm and list items made from cotton, then share their list with another student.
• Students will cross out the word cotton and replace it with wool.
• The class will discuss the lists of items.

Discussion:

Cotton, the raw material, becomes King—an economic force that played a major role in bringing about the Civil War
• What is the impact of a foreign commodity on American history?
• How do ideas and commodities cross cultural regions?
• Where does cotton come from?
• How did cotton get from India to the South (through trade routes)?

Textbook and Overhead Work:

• Pass out textbooks (America: Pathways to the Present).
• Have students locate the section in the textbook with maps (Building Skill in Geography: World Map).
• Have students locate and label the major landmasses and bodies of water in the world.
• Pass out the world map worksheet.
• Have students mark the route that cotton took to get to the United States.
• Have students color the areas in the world that produced cotton.
• Discuss the overhead of World Cotton Production by Region and Time.

Further Discussion:

How important was cotton to the world?
• The teacher will read excerpts from The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. Examples follow:

South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond, also a former governor, plantation owner and cotton farmer, “believed that civilization rested on the importance of cotton to the industrial centers of the Northern states and Europe. The giant textile mills that line the rivers of the new industrial centers depended upon the South to supply cotton. This bit of fluff. . .reigned supremely over the world’s new economic order. Southern cotton had a God-given monopoly. Because it could not be grown either in the Northern states or in England, Hammond reasoned, the industrial world would bow to cotton, and the south had nothing to fear.” (The Travels of a T-Shirt, p. 20)

Senator Hammond stated to the U.S. Senate shortly before the Civil War started, “Would any sane nation make war on cotton? Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us, we could bring the world to our feet. . . . What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? . . . this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the civilized world with her, save the South.” (The Travels of a T-Shirt, p. 20)

Further Textbook Work:

The students will receive an introduction to the course and to the textbook by analyzing visual information. They will gain a sense of the economic factors leading to the Civil War by analyzing the following visual information:

• p. 111 Analyzing Art. Discuss the woodcut of two men operating two huge
machines that are printing calico fabric (calico design comes from India)

• p. 111 Read “The Industrial Revolution”

• p. 112 Read “Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin (Increased Slave Labor and a
Cash Crop)”

• p. 118 Interpreting Diagrams. Textile Mill in New England. Read “The
Northern Economy”

• p. 119 Analyzing Art. Discuss the two workers loading cotton on ships in New
Orleans

• p. 119 Read and discuss “The Southern Economy”

• p. 133 Interpreting Graphs. Immigration to the U.S., 1821-1860. Where do
Northerners work?—the textile factories. Where do they get the cotton?
—the South

• p. 139 Interpreting Charts. Economic Advantages of the North and South.
What items would be exported and what would be for consumption?

• p. 155 Review Map of U.S. divided into North, South and Border States

• p. 156 Picture of a Southern woman sewing a Confederate soldier’s hat.
How would uniforms be made in the North?—factories

• p. 159 Interpreting Diagrams. Comparing advantages of North to South

• p. 164 Paragraph describing the blockade of Southern shipping of cotton to
England and France

• p. 174-5 Interpreting Political Cartoons. A Northern newspaper reading The
Southern Economy (cotton piled-up in warehouses) and The Northern
Economy (factories)

• p. 195 Interpreting Political Cartoons. England and France look on as South and
North fight.
Rioting in France and England as textile factories close. (They must find a
new source of cotton, so they look to India. India greatly benefits from the
American Civil War, but not for long.)

• p. 196 Photo: The Industrialized North vs. the Agrarian South

• p. 212-13 Analyzing Art. Compare the idealized painting of two girls picking
cotton to the photograph of an African American family of
sharecroppers.

• P. 214 Interpreting Graphs. American cotton production, 1860-1870

Assessment:

Groups of students will create their own pantoums, based on the lesson.
• Show students the overhead of How to Create a Pantoum.
• Divide students into groups of four.
• Ask the groups to create their own Pantoums by using the following quote by South Carolina Senator Hammond:

“No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares make war on cotton. Cotton is King.”
• Pantoums will be put on large sheets of newsprint.
• Each student must participate in the writing of the pantoum.
• Pantoums will be displayed around the room.
• Students will read and discuss their pantoums, once complete.

Closure Exercise:

A reflection on the day’s lesson and a plan for the future:
• Give students 3x5 index cards and have them write three things they learned today on one side.
• On the other side, ask them to vote for their favorite pantoum, and to write two to four sentences explaining why they chose it.
• Assign homework: Using maps to show change over time. On p. 217 of the textbook, the maps show the same plantation of 2000 acres during slavery and the layout of the slave cabins as compared to the layout of the sharecroppers. Analyze the maps and answer the four questions that follow.

Student work

• Pantoums from student groups