coursework. n. 1. (Education) written or oral work completed by a student within a given period, which is assessed as an integral part of an educational course.
More than the infusion of population, colonist John Rolfe's discovery of a profitable cash crop-tobacco-sealed the fate of the Virginia colony. Economically, tobacco became to the Chesapeake what sugar was to West Indies and silver was to Mexico. However, tobacco required a great deal of labor to cultivate.
Until that point, most cotton was farmed in large plantations in the Province of Carolina, and tobacco, which could be grown profitably in farms of smaller scale, was the dominant cash crop export of the South and the Middle Atlantic States.