• Ajit Solanki / AP

    Indian laborers unload cotton from a truck at a cotton mill in Dhrangadhra, about 110 kilometers from Ahmadabad, India, Dec. 16.

    High cotton: Indian laborers unload billowy crop

    1 comment

    I love that 100% cotton stuff.....nothing like it....

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  • National Photo Company Collection / Library of Congress

    Eli Whitney's cotton gin [between 1909 and 1920]. A cotton mill in Augusta, Georgia is closing after being operated since 1868 by descendants of the cotton gin's inventor.

    Dorothea Lange / Farm Security Administration / Library of Congress

    Cotton sharecroppers. Greene County, Georgia. They produce little, sell little, buy little. June 1937

    Dorothea Lange / Farm Security Administration / Library of Congress

    The cotton sharecropper's unit is one mule and the land he can cultivate with a one-horse plow. Greene County, Georgia, July 1937

    F.E. Lee Co. / Library of Congress

    A Georgia cotton plantation, 1917

    F.E. Lee Co. / Library of Congress

    Picking cotton in Georgia, 1917.

    Lewis Wickes Hine / National Child Labor Committee / Library of Congress

    Some adolescents in a Georgia Cotton Mill. 1909.

    Lewis Wickes Hine / National Child Labor Committee / Library of Congress

    Doffer boys in Georgia Cotton Mill. 1909

    Dorothea Lange / Farm Security Administration / Library of Congress

    Farm boy with sack full of boll weevils which he has picked off of cotton plants. Macon County, Georgia, July 1937

    End of (another) cotton era in South?

    By Stokes Young, nbcnews.com

    Sometimes a news story with historical resonance prompts us to dig through the Library of Congress archive for visual context. That's the case here.

    As NPR reports, a cotton mill in Augusta, Georgia run by descendants of cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney is shutting down, and some folks are noting the symbolic and historic importance of the event:

    Between 2006 and '09, U.S. cotton acreage dropped by 40 percent. That's exactly when Whitney's business dried up.

    "The old world of cotton is probably dead," says Darren Hudson, director of the Cotton Economics Research Institute at Texas Tech University.

    According to Hudson, S.M. Whitney's closing is the symbolic end of an era. He says today's market is all about export sales, not business relationships.

    Read more about the closing here.

    It's worth seeing the F.E. Lee Co. panoramic images from 1917 at larger size on the Library of Congress site:
    A Georgia Cotton plantation
    Picking Cotton in Georgia

    We have previously published pictures by Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine.

  • Danish Siddiqui / Reuters

    A man works inside a cotton factory in Mumbai June 4, 2010. India is the second biggest producer, consumer and exporter of cotton and about sixty percent of the current season shipments went to China, the biggest consumer.

    Danish Siddiqui / Reuters

    Laundrymen work at the Dhobi Ghat open air laundry in Mumbai June 5, 2010.Termed as the world's largest outdoor laundry, Dhobi Ghat is where Mumbai's traditional laundrymen work in the open to wash clothes from different parts of the city. The open air laundry has about 700 washing platforms made of stones where about 200 washer-men families have been washing clothes as their family business for decades.

    Ginning cotton and washing laundry in Mumbai

    Two strong pictures of men at work by Danish Siddiqui. I came across the first picture early this morning on the Guardian's 'Eyewitness' iPad app, which is a neat tablet display of photojournalism "from the Guardian's centre page Eyewitness spread."