Curated OER
Cotton Pickin' Before and After the Civil War
Students explore the impact of cotton. For this economics lesson, students listen to a lecture presented by their instructor on the Southern crop of cotton and its impact on the South prior to and following the Civil War. Students...
Digital History
Digital History: Pre Civil War South
A comprehensive look at the economy of the South and the changes brought by the cotton gin. Read through five pages that discuss the economy, the tradition of the plantation, and the sectionalism that arises in this time period.
![United States History: Ch. 3 Sec. 1: The Southern Colonies [Pdf] eBook](https://d15y2dacu3jp90.cloudfront.net/images/attachment_defaults/resource/large/FPO-knovation.png "United States History: Ch. 3 Sec. 1: The Southern Colonies [Pdf] eBook")
Other
United States History: Ch. 3 Sec. 1: The Southern Colonies [Pdf]
A chapter from a history text that looks at the development of the Southern Colonies. It discusses the Southern agricultural economy that relied on slave labor, tobacco as a cash crop, Southern society, indentured servitude, Bacon's...
Digital History
Digital History: From Slave Labor to Free Labor
The most difficult task confronting many Southerners during Reconstruction was devising a new system of labor to replace the shattered world of slavery. Learn how plantation owners and freed slaves adapted to this massive shift in the...
University of Virginia
Virginia Center for Digital History: United States Expansion, 1800 1860
An essay that looks at issues affecting Americans leading up to the Civil War. These included economic changes that led to new ideological, social, cultural, and political issues that further divided the nation along moral and regional...
Other
Encyclopedia of Arkansas: Carpetbaggers and Scalawags
An even-handed description of carpetbaggers and scalawags, particularly in regard to their beneficial activities in Arkansas.
Independence Hall Association
U.s. History: The Southern Argument for Slavery
In order to convince oneself that owning another was defensible, Southerners aruged that there were economic, religious, historical, and legal reaons that slavery was a good thing. Read about some of these justifications in more detail,...
Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press.
New Georgia Encyclopedia: Cotton
Encyclopedia article portraying the importance of cotton to Georgia's agricultural economy during the Civil War up until World War I.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy: Ap Us History: 1865 1898: After the Civil War: The New South
After the Civil War, there was some impetus to modernize the South's economy to make it more industrialized and less agrarian. It never gained traction while sharecropping and tenant farming did, ensuring the persistence of rural...
Other
Mr. Kash's History Page: Comparing and Contrasting the North and South
Chart showing the differences between the North and the South in the United States in the mid-1800s. Students are asked to copy the information and to write a paragraph explaining the differences.
PBS
Pbs: Africans in America: Slavery and the Origins of the Civil War
An article by Columbia University historian Eric Foner that discusses how long-standing views of the role of slavery in America began to be challenged during the civil rights era of the 1960s by a new generation of historians, whose work...
American Battlefield Trust
American Battlefield Trust: Civil War: North and South: Different Cultures, Same Country
The Civil War that raged across the nation from 1861 to 1865 was the violent conclusion to decades of diversification. Gradually, throughout the beginning of the nineteenth century, the North and South followed different paths,...