Historian Edward Baptist reveals how the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. Reprint. 20,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)
Uses slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians and entrepreneurs to explain how slavery drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. - (Baker & Taylor)
A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people
Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians
Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize
Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution -- the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.
Told through the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.
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Grand Central Pub)
A groundbreaking, must-read history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of slaves
Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution -- the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in the prizewinning The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.
Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.
Bloomberg View Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 2014
Daily Beast Best Nonfiction Books of 2014
Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians
Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize
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Perseus Publishing)
Edward E. Baptist is a professor of history at Cornell University. Author of the award-winning Creating an Old South, he lives in Ithaca, New York.
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Grand Central Pub)
Edward E. Baptist is an professor of history at Cornell University. Author of the award-winning Creating an Old South, he lives in Ithaca, New York. - (Perseus Publishing)
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* While Americans like to look at slavery as a pre-modern labor system, tinged by racist and moralistic perspectives, Baptist argues that slavery was the major economic engine that helped to propel the growth of the U.S. in the nineteenth century and eventually make it a world power. Baptist renders history and economics with the power of prose that seeks to tell a fuller story than has been told of American slavery, drawing on plantation records and the personal narratives of former slaves interviewed by Works Progress Administration workers. Riffing on Ralph Ellison's depiction of the African American body as the site of the American drama, Baptist offers chapters on head, feet, hands, tongues, arms, and backs to describe the aggressive push to maintain enslaved labor, the violence and power wielded to expand slavery, and the resistance of slaves and abolitionists. He details the significance of slavery to cotton cultivation and the significance of cotton in fueling the economy of the industrial North. As U.S. capitalism supported by slavery grew, so did the politics to support it, influencing the allocation of state representation and even the presidency for 70 years. An insightful look at U.S. slavery and its controversial role in the much-celebrated story of American capitalism. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.
Library Journal Reviews
Baptist argues that this country's success in the global marketplace stems directly from the brutal efficiency of slavery and that in that system cruelty and capitalism went hand in hand. (LJ 8/14)
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Library Journal Reviews
Baptist (Creating an Old South) has written a book that truly deepens and broadens our understanding of slavery. Through an incredible amount of detail and the use of an array of primary sources, the author argues that the South's use of slave labor in cotton production was the primary factor in the United States becoming a leading modern industrial nation. He tells his story more or less chronologically but structures each chapter around a theme derived from a part or aspect of the human body: blood, head, arms, breath, and so on. Made up of two distinct parts, the book opens with seven chapters that cover the period from 1783 to 1837 and focus on the growth of slavery, delineating what life was like for slaves during this period. The final four chapters, which run from 1836 through the aftermath of the Civil War, detail the entrenchment of slavery and the political struggles over its continuation and expansion—and consequently focus less on the lives of victims. VERDICT Professional historians and lay readers will pore over this book for years to come. Essential for all readers interested in American history and the history of slavery.—Derek Sanderson, Mount Saint Mary Coll. Lib., Newburgh, NY
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Publishers Weekly Reviews
Cornell University historian Baptist (Creating an Old South) delivers an unapologetic, damning, and grisly account of slavery's foundational place in the emergence of America as a global superpower, balancing the macro lens of statistics and national trends with intimate slave narratives. Delivered in a voice that fluidly incorporates both academic objectivity and coarse language, the book is organized into chapters named after a slave's body parts (i.e., "Heads" and "Arms"), brutal images reinforced by the "metastatic rate" of the "endlessly expanding economy" of slavery in the U.S. in the first half of the 18th century. The "massive markets," "accelerating growth," and new economic institutions in America's "nexus of cotton, slaves, and credit" lend credence to Baptist's insistence that common conceptions of the slave South as economically doomed from the start are possible only in hindsight. At the dawn of the Civil War, he suggests, the South's perception that it was a "highly successful, innovative sector," was coupled with slave-owners' belief that objections to slavery in the North rested not on moral concerns, but on fears of "political bullying" from the slave states. Baptist's chronicle exposes the taint of blood in virtually all of the wealth that Americans have inherited from their forebears, making it a rewarding read for anyone interested in U.S.A.'s dark history. (Sept.)
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