Alabama
State in southern USA; nicknamed Heart of Dixie/Camellia
State
Area:
134,700 sq km/51,994 sq mi
Capital:
Montgomery
Towns and Cities:
Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville, Tuscaloosa
Physical:
The state comprises the Cumberland Plateau in the N with the Appalachian
Mountains; the Black Belt, or Canebrake, cotton-growing country in the
centre; and S of this, the coastal plain of Piny Woods. The Alabama
River (the largest in the state) and the Tennessee River flow through
the state
Features:
Fort Morgan (dating from the early 1800s) on Pleasure Island in the
Gulf of Mexico; De Soto Caverns, onyx caves used as a Native American
burial ground 2,000 years ago; Mobile, with Fort Conde (a restored 1711
fort), pre-Civil War mansions, and Mardi Gras celebrations (the first
Mardi Gras in the USA took place here); Birmingham, with the Birmingham
Civil Rights Institute (1992) and the Jazz Hall of Fame; Montgomery,
with pre-Civil War houses, the White House of the Confederacy (1835),
and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival; Battleship Park, with USS Alabama
and the submarine USS Drum from World War II; Tuskegee University, a
centre for the study of black history; US Space Camp, with NASA laboratories
and shuttle test sites, at Huntsville
Industries:
Cotton (still important though no longer prime crop); soya beans, peanuts,
wood products, coal, livestock, poultry, iron, steel, aluminium, chemicals,
textiles, paper
Population:
(1996 est) 4,273,100
Famous people:
Hank Aaron, Tallulah Bankhead, Nat King Cole, W C Handy, Helen Keller,
Joe Louis, Willie Mays, Jesse Owens, Leroy `SatchelŽ Paige, George C
Wallace, Booker T Washington, Hank Williams
History:
First settled by the French in the early 18th century, it was ceded
to Britain 1763, passed to the USA 1783, and became a state 1819.
It was one of the Confederate States in the American Civil War,
and Montgomery was the first capital of the Confederacy. Birmingham
became the South's leading industrial centre in the late 19th
century. Alabama was in the forefront of the civil-rights movement
in the 1950s and 1960s: Martin Luther King led a successful boycott
of segregated Montgomery buses 1955; school integration began
in the early 1960s despite the opposition of Governor George C
Wallace; the 1965 Selma march resulted in federal voting-rights
legislation.
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