Awards

The Edelstein Prize

The Edelstein Prize is awarded to the author of an outstanding scholarly book in the history of technology published in the preceding three years. Established as the Dexter Prize in 1968 through the generosity of the late Sidney Edelstein—founder of the Dexter Chemical Corporation, noted expert on the history of dyes and dye processes, and 1988 recipient of SHOT's Leonardo da Vinci Medal—the Edelstein Prize is donated by Ruth Edelstein Barish and her family in memory of Sidney Edelstein and his commitment to excellence in scholarship in the history of technology.

The 2004 Edelstein Prize was awarded to Angela Lakwete for Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). The citation read:

Angela Lakwete's elegant study, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America, has modest proportions. But the length of her splendid volume should not deceive readers; this is an ambitious, pathbreaking work, rich in revisionist conclusions. In spare, carefully constructed prose, Lakwete intends to overturn the myth, as she terms it, of technological passivity and stagnation in the antebellum American South. In her hands, the complex trajectory of the cotton gin becomes the measure of both inventiveness and determined entrepreneurship below the Mason-Dixon line. Accordingly, Lakwete demonstrates that Eli Whitney's contribution, however novel, did not lift the ginning of cotton from a premechanized craft into the machine age.

The cotton gin had a long history before it connected Southern fields and British textile manufacture. Lakwete begins her book with an account of the delicate art of separating cottonseed and fiber before 1600. Most notably, she reveals a pattern of technical shifts in the centuries before Whitney, especially the attachment of the rollers to a treadle to create the foot gin. From there, in 1788, Joseph Eve fashioned an inanimately powered, self-feeding roller gin. As a result, Lakwete maintains, ginning technology was not the bottleneck portrayed in heroic accounts of Whitney and his work.

Lakwete offers a concise, yet nuanced, account of the controversies that seemingly will swirl forever around Whitney's role in the creation of the saw gin, which he patented in 1794. Certainly, the device quickened processing as well as the short-staple cotton market. But Lakwete's primary concern, and one of the most important contributions of her scholarship, is the celebration that attended Whitney's invention. As a result of the academic and the popular depictions of his device as an unprecedented departure, the role of Southern hands in the continuous refinement of the gin has been lost.

Lakwete's consideration of the production of both the roller and saw gins is riveting. Here she confirms reciprocal relations between Southern agriculture and manufacturing. She depicts zones of nascent industrialization, where mechanics and gin designers shared ideas and created devices of ever greater output. Meanwhile, she chronicles, with genuine sensitivity, the boundaries and the prospects of the laboring men who turned out the gins, an amalgam of whites, free blacks, and the enslaved. Forcefully, she reminds us of the irony that skilled black hands had a role in the manufacture of the device that did not cause slavery, but enhanced its utility.

Lakwete's book, then, is at once a fine microhistory of the evolution of a single technology and a reinterpretation of the nature of the Southern economy as a whole. By emphasizing the interplay of machine production and the cotton field within the antebellum South, she challenges its image as a technologically introverted region. By rejecting the demonization of the cotton gin, and of Whitney himself, as the mainspring of slavery, she permits a more subtle understanding of both the resiliency of the peculiar institution as well as the indigenous mechanical culture and practice that helped sustain it. The Society for the History of Technology is pleased to award the Edelstein Prize for 2004 to Angela Lakwete for her distinguished work.

The Sally Hacker Prize

The Sally Hacker Prize was established in 1999 to recognize the best popular book written in...