Alabama State Map

Alabama is a state in the southeast of the United States. With a population of over 4.8 million and an area of ​​135,765 square kilometers, it is the 30th largest and the 23th most populous US state. The capital is Montgomery, but nearly a quarter of the population in the metropolitan area of ​​Birmingham, gathered the largest city in Alabama.

Alabama State Map

Alabama is on the north by Tennessee, on the east by Georgia, on the south by Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, and bounded on the west by Mississippi. This location makes Alabama the geographical center of the American Deep South.

The state exists alongside the coastal area mainly plains where the Tombigbee-, Black Warrior- and Alabamariviere flow, and parts of the Tennessee Valley and Cumberland Plateau in the north. Historically, Alabama was famous for its cotton plantations and white marble quarries.

The distinctive diversity of its landscapes, geology and topography gives a special character to Alabama. found between the Appalachians Mountains and the coastal plain of the Gulf of Mexico is the richest natural floral and faunahabitatte in the United States. The Tennessee River valley in the extreme north of the state due to its fertile land ideal for agriculture. The rugged mountainous terrain of the Appalachians range's southeastern foothills stretching from Northeast Alabama in southwestern direction.

The Black Belt, which owes its name to its dark fertile soil and as heartland of the cotton industry has played a decisive role in the history of Alabama, is located at the foot of the mountain range. South of pine forests are and coastal plains found that up to the moss-covered oak landscape of Mobile, Alabama's main seaport, and the white sandy beaches of the Gulf of Mexico extends.

But despite its mineral resources and large water supplies Alabama joined for most of its history with poverty and economic backwardness. Independence wing of large landowners, which only represent a small percentage of Alabama's white population and all political, averted economic and cultural influences from outside, has managed to keep black residents as slaves in their cotton plantations and amassed huge wealth. At the height of this process, they were based in 1861, with the ruling elites of other southern states made the decision to leave the Union and as Gekonfedereerde States proceed with a political and economic system based on the exploitation of black manpower .

The results were disastrous. More than a fifth of the economically active white men were killed in the American Civil War, while eliminating slavery by the victorious North States hundreds of millions of capital destroyed in the southern agricultural sector.

Yet the North finally managed to put his political liberal structures in the South State. Conservative whites regained their dominant influence on Alabama's political and economic life and established their own system of racial segregation that would continue until the sixties of the 20th century and where black residents as poor whites of their political rights deprived.

This system, which was described by some observers as a continuation of the Civil War, was not affected by the process of economic revolution and industrialization. Alabama's katoenmonokultuur experienced its decline with the establishment of new industries, while the center of gravity of economic activity of Mobile's port and other settlements along the great rivers of new urban centers in the interior moved by railroads with each other and other parts of the USA is committed.

With Alabama's new constitution, which was promulgated in 1901, all political opposition in rural areas removed harshly and the old conservative system of white supremacy, racial and class divisions vasgeskryf. The majority of African-Americans, like many poor whites and whites from the working class, almost lost their voting rights.