Cotton Culture in the South from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement

FAIN: ES-50293-09

Corporation Of Mercer University (Macon, GA 31207-1515)
Sarah E. Gardner (Project Director: March 2009 to May 2017)

Funding details:
Original grant (2009) $215,287.00
Supplement (2010) $10,000.00

A five-week high school teacher institute for twenty-one participants on the South's cotton culture from the close of the Civil War to the rise of the Civil Rights movement.

The southern studies faculty at Mercer University proposes to host a five-week NEH institute for high school teachers on Cotton Culture in the South from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement. The institute will allow twenty-one teachers of English, history, economics, government, geography, art, and music to learn about the complex social structures of the U.S. South in the crucial yet frequently misunderstood hundred years after the war, a period that included both major social problems and amazing cultural development. An interdisciplinary panel of experts on the South will use the cultivation of cotton--the South's most significant economic product during this time--as a means to analyze and understand the region's history, geography, economics, politics, culture, and literature.