A 1915 McClure's magazine article by Edward Mott Woolley on the history of the American cotton industry. It follows Tench Coxe's effort to obtain Arkwright's spinning machine, Samuel Slater's founding of power spinning at Pawtucket, and Eli Whitney's cotton gin. It then covers the rise of cotton-seed oil and other by-products, and the New England mill-owning families (Lowell, Appleton, Lawrence, Brown) and the shift of manufacturing to the South. Illustrations are captioned photographs of cotton-seed products.