Alabama History

Among the Native American people once living in the area of present day Alabama were Alabama (Alibamu), Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Koasati, and Mobile.[10] Trade with the Northeast via the Ohio River began during the Burial Mound Period (1000 BC-A.D. 700) and continued until European contact.[11] Meso-American influence is evident in the agrarian Mississippian culture that followed.

The French founded the first European settlement in the state with the establishment of Mobile in 1702.[12] Southern Alabama was French from 1702 to 1763, part of British West Florida from 1763 to 1780, and part of Spanish West Florida from 1780 to 1814. Northern and central Alabama was part of British Georgia from 1763 to 1783 and part of the American Mississippi territory thereafter. Its statehood was delayed by the lack of a coastline; rectified when Andrew Jackson captured Spanish Mobile in 1814.[13] Alabama was the twenty-second state admitted to the Union, in 1819.

The economy of the central "Black Belt" featured large rich slave plantations that grew cotton.[14] Elsewhere poor whites were subsistence farmers. Alabama seceded and joined the Confederate States of America, 1861–65. While not many battles were fought in the state, Alabama contributed about 120,000 soldiers to the Civil War. All the slaves were freed by 1865.[15] After a period of Reconstruction it emerged as a poor rural state, still tied to cotton, with high racial tensions between the ruling whites and the recently emancipated blacks, who had second-class legal, social and economic status.[14] The blacks lost the right to vote in 1901, and, after 1917, many migrated to northern cities. Politically, the state was one-party Democratic, and produced a number of national leaders. World War II brought prosperity.[14] Cotton faded in importance as the state developed a manufacturing and service base. In the 1960s, under Governor George Wallace, the state opposed federal integration efforts. After the passage of the Civil Rights Laws of 1964 and 1965, African Americans regained the right to vote and de jure segregation as Jim Crow laws were invalidated or repealed.[16] After 1972, the state became a Republican stronghold in presidential elections (as with most of its neighboring states), and, since 1990 especially, has become increasingly Republican in state elections.[17]

In Wetumpka (We-tump-ca, Creek Indian meaning rumbling waters) Alabama, a small town just north of Montgomery, sits the site of Alabama's greatest natural disaster. An impact crater hit Elmore County near the end of the Age of the Dinosaurs, about 83 million years ago. The hills just east of downtown Wetumpka are the eroded remains of a five mile wide meteor crater that was blasted into the bedrock. Experts and geologists from all over the world have visited this small town to observe the impact crater first-hand. Christian Koeberl, Institute of Geochemistry University of Vienna, an international expert on impact craters, examined the evidence and confirmed the presence of shocked quartz and other minerals that would definitely confirm the site as an impact crater. In the fall of 2002 Koeberl published evidence and established the site as an internationally recognized impact crater. It is believed that at the time of the impact, the area was covered by a shallow sea of up to 100 feet in depth, making this the best preserved marine impact crater in the world.