| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. By Angela Lakwete. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xvi, 232 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-7394-0.)

In popular mythology, the association of Eli Whitney with the cotton gin rivals that of George Washington with the cherry tree. Angela Lakwete argues convincingly that the Whitney myth took root in a seedbed of early nineteenth-century nationalism carefully tended by Whitney's business partner Phineas Miller and Whitney's first biographer, Denison Olmsted. The myth makers depicted a world before Whitney in which cotton fibers were separated from the seed by hand; they belittled competing technologies such as the roller gin; and they promoted Whitney as an inventive genius and the savior of the American cotton industry.

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