Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion from Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond

Of course, this isn't the first time that technological advances made workers' lives miser-able. The invention of the cotton gin at the end of the eighteenth century made cotton growing exponentially more profitable for Southern farmers, and this meant more slaves to man the cotton fields and gins in order to crank out the profits. With Eli Whitney's invention, Southern plantation owners were producing one-fourth of the world's cotton supply: in 1801, 100,000 bales of cotton were produced, a figure that soared, thanks to the cotton gin, to 4.5 million bales in 1860. Not coincidentally, the number of slaves used to service the cotton al-so boomed, rising from fewer than 1 million in 1800 to nearly 4 million by the start of the Civil War.