An Americanism dating back to 1870–75
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In many of the areas of the Cotton Belt, slaves were the majority of the population.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 27, 2025
Easily the raunchiest Confederate relic north of the Cotton Belt is Maryland’s never-in-mode state song, “Maryland, My Maryland.”
From Washington Post ● Apr. 9, 2021
Amid a vast migration during the early 20th century, tens of thousands of black people came to California’s farm country from far-off states in the Cotton Belt and the Dust Bowl.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 24, 2019
Former Cotton Belt Railroad employee Ray Stevenson was born in 1961, just a toddler as segregation was ending for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
From Washington Times ● Feb. 18, 2018
Then I worked at the Cotton Belt Shops eight years.
From Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves Arkansas Narratives, Part 5 by Work Projects Administration
In 2009, India’s agricultural export agency discovered wide-scale fraud in the country’s cotton belt, with entire villages certifying genetically modified cotton as organic.
From New York Times ● Feb. 13, 2022
Born into slavery in the Georgia cotton belt in 1818, she was seemingly destined for a life of hard labor and a death in obscurity.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 10, 2020
It may foreshadow the discovery of other forgotten slave cemeteries as the city of Tallahassee’s boundaries edge northward into the county’s former cotton belt.
From Washington Times ● Jun. 14, 2020
Across the central cotton belt, especially in Telangana and Maharashtra, at-risk farmers were particularly impoverished and often lacked irrigation infrastructure that would stabilize cotton farming.
From Salon ● Dec. 15, 2019
He still wears the old style of dress: a loose jacket with wide sleeves made of dark blue woolen cloth, gathered around the waist by a closely-woven cotton belt; short, wide-legged trousers of buckskin.
From In Indian Mexico (1908) by Starr, Frederick
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
