No single commodity had a greater effect on America’s history and culture than cotton. In the antebellum United States, King Cotton propelled an economic boom that led to the dispossession of southeastern Native Americans, the development of plantations across the South, and an explosion in the domestic slave trade that inevitably led to the Civil War. But what happened after the war?

This symposium brings together many of the nation’s most prominent scholars of the culture of cotton, who will explain how cotton continued to define the socioeconomic culture of the South for the century after the Civil War. Historians, literary critics, and cultural scholars will discuss how cotton affected southern life from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century in agriculture, politics, labor, music, literature, and film.

The keynote address will take place in the Presidents Dining Room of the University Center on Friday, March 17, at 6:00 pm followed by a full day of presentations on Saturday, March 18, from 9:30 am to 7:00 pm in Godsey Science Center room 102. All of the lectures are free and open to the public.