Alabama’s population increased from under 10,000 people in 1810 to more than 300,000 people by 1830.

As early as 1702, the French called the tribe the Alibamon, and French maps identified the river as Rivière des Alibamons.

The first European settlement in Alabama was founded by the French at Old Mobile in 1702. The city was moved to the current site of Mobile in 1711.

Alabama has a total area of 52,419 square miles (135,760 km²).

An 1842 article in the Jacksonville Republican proposed that “Alabama” meant ‘Here We Rest’, a notion popularized in the 1850s through the writings of Alexander Beaufort Meek.

Alabama’s oldest city is Mobile, which was founded by French colonists (Alabama Creoles) in 1702 as the capital of French Louisiana.

About three-fifths of Alabama’s land area is part of the Gulf Coastal Plain, a gentle plain that descends towards the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.

Alabama was a Spanish territory in the sixteenth century until the French acquired it in the early eighteenth century. The British won the territory in 1763, and Spain held Mobile as part of Spanish West Florida until 1813.

The economy of Alabama’s Black Belt region was built around large cotton plantations whose owners’ wealth grew mainly from slave labor. Southeastern planters and traders from the Upper South brought slaves with them as the cotton plantations in Alabama ...Read more

High-profile events such as the Selma to Montgomery marches made Alabama a major focal point of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.