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How Eli Whitney Single-Handedly Caused the Civil War and Why That Isn't True

How Eli Whitney Single-Handedly Caused the Civil War and Why That Isn't True In-Person

The Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute invites you to a lecture by Dr. Ariel Ron, Director of the SMU Clements Center for Southwest Studies, marking the 200th anniversary of the death of Eli Whitney. This is the second event in the 2025 Godbey Anniversary Lecture Series.

Eli Whitney, the Connecticut Yankee and ingenious mechanic, pulled himself up by the bootstraps and got a degree from Yale, went down South to teach school and invented the cotton gin so that the planters could thrive. When he got back up North, he did a trick better and came up with interchangeable parts, the idea behind the northern manufacturing boom. Eli Whitney made the fortunes of the South and North alike and set them on opposite courses, the one toward agriculture and slavery, the other toward industrialization and the modern factory. It was inevitable they would come to blows and just as inevitable the industrialists would win. There's only one problem. Almost none of it is true. 

Ariel Ron is the Glenn M. Linden Associate Professor of the U.S. Civil War Era and Director of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies. He is the author of Grassroots Leviathan: Northern Agricultural Reform in the Slaveholding Republic, which won best-book awards from the Agricultural History Society and the Center for Civil War Research, and has earned fellowships from the Library of Congress, Cornell University, Yale University and other academic institutions. 

Date:
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Time:
5:30pm - 7:15pm
Time Zone:
Central Time - US & Canada (change)
Location:
Meadows Museum - Jones Great Hall

Registration is required. There are 100 seats available.

Join us for a reception in the Founder's Room of the Meadows Museum at 5:30 p.m., followed by the lecture at 6:00 p.m. in Jones Great Hall. Appetizers will be served.

Parking is free for museum visitors. More information about parking can be found at the museum's website.

For more information about the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute, please visit our website.

Any person who requires a reasonable accommodation on the basis of a disability in order to participate in this program should contact the DCII at dcinterdisciplinaryinstitute@smu.edu at least one week prior to the event to arrange for the accommodation. 

Speakers express their own views and not necessarily the views of the DCII or SMU. 

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