When I walked in to class the first day of school , he told us get out some paper and write this down. I thought O.K. just probally those boring class rules again. He said read Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology,I thought oh how cool we get to read a book! So I found the book and read it.Here is my comments and summary.I was amazed to learn that we were not doing to good economical in the 1700s. England got mad at us because we were no longer doing things they hoped America would,so we went our way and they went thiers.America started declining in economics because we no longer had the machinery that England had supplied us with. We kept declining because we no longer knew how to do anything independantly. Suddenly we could grow cotton! Pulling the seeds out of the cotton was hard labor and the colonists could only produce 1 pound a day. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin to make the labor of picking seeds out of cotton easier. He was not very good at reading, but doing figures was easy.This helped him majorly in inventing the cotton gin and many other inventions. If you are interested in America's struggle for economics in thr 1700s,I would highly recommend this great book.