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The name cornrows refers to the layout of crops in corn and sugar cane fields in the Americas and Caribbean, [1] [6] where enslaved Africans were displaced during the Atlantic slave trade. [7] According to Black folklore, cornrows were often used to communicate on the Underground Railroad and by Benkos Biohó during his time as a slave in ...
These plantations played a large role in developing the Northern economy in opposing lines from the plantation-based economy of the American South. Compared to the large-scale cash crop plantations which underpinned the Southern economy, plantations in New England were small-scale, and meant mainly for subsistence purposes rather than profit ...
Barley and wheat were the most important crops in most European regions; oats and rye were also grown, along with a variety of vegetables and fruits. Oxen and horses were used as draft animals. Sheep were raised for wool and pigs were raised for meat. Crop failures due to bad weather were frequent throughout the Middle Ages and famine was often ...
A four-ox-team plough, circa 1330. The ploughman is using a mouldboard plough to cut through the heavy soils. A team could plough about one acre (0.4 ha) per day. The typical planting scheme in a three-field system was that barley, oats, or legumes would be planted in one field in spring, wheat or rye in the second field in the fall and the third field would be left fallow.
The Middle Colonies' political groups began as small groups with narrowly focused goals. These coalitions eventually grew into diverse and large political organizations, evolving especially during the French and Indian War. [19] The Middle Colonies were generally run by Royal or Proprietary Governors and elected Colonial Assemblies.
Colonists tried to use Native Americans for labor, but they were susceptible to European diseases and died in large numbers. The plantation owners then turned to enslaved Africans for labor. In 1665, there were fewer than 500 Africans in Virginia but by 1750, 85 percent of the 235,000 slaves lived in the Southern colonies, Virginia included.
At harvest time the sharecropper kept a share of the crop production (from one-third to one-half), with the landowner taking the rest. The cropper used his share to pay off his debt to the merchant. The system started with blacks when large plantations were subdivided. By the 1880s, white farmers also became sharecroppers.
Agricultural history took a different path from the Old World as the Americas lacked large-seeded, easily domesticated grains (such as wheat and barley) and large domestic animals that could be used for agricultural labor. Rather than the practice which developed in the Old World of sowing a field with a single crop, pre-historic American ...