Alabama is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Originally home to many native tribes, present-day Alabama was a Spanish territory beginning in the sixteenth century until the French acquired it in the early eighteenth century, founding Mobile in 1702. The British won the territory in 1763 until losing it in the American Revolutionary War.
Spain held Mobile as part of Spanish West Florida until 1813; Spain ceded West Florida to the US in 1819. In December 1819, Alabama was recognized as a state. During the antebellum period, Alabama was a major cotton producer and widely used African-American slaves on its plantations. In 1861, the state seceded from the United States to become part of the Confederate States of America, with Montgomery acting as its first capital, and rejoined the Union in 1868.
From the American Civil War until World War II, Alabama, like many states in the southern U.S., suffered economic hardship, in part because of its continued dependence on agriculture. Similar to other former slave states, Alabamian legislators employed Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise and otherwise discriminate against African Americans from the end of the Reconstruction Era up until at least the 1970s.
Despite the growth of major industries and urban centers, white rural interests dominated the state legislature from 1901 to the 1960s. During this time, urban interests and African Americans were markedly under-represented. High-profile events such as the Selma to Montgomery march made the state a major focal point of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
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