The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism - Hardcover

Baptist, Edward E

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 046500296X ISBN 13: 9780465002962

Publisher: Basic Books, 2014

Synopsis

A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of slaves

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 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

About this title

About the Author:

Edward E. Baptist is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. Author of the award-winning Creating an Old South, he grew up in Durham, North Carolina. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

Review:

 
Peniel Joseph, Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, and author of Stokely: A Life
"The Half Has Never Been Told is a true marvel. Groundbreaking, thoroughly researched, expansive, and provocative it will force scholars of slavery and its aftermath to reconsider long held assumptions about the 'peculiar institution's' relationship to American capitalism and contemporary issues of race and democracy. Engagingly written and bursting with fresh, powerful, and provocative insights, this book deserves to be widely read, discussed, and debated."
 

About this edition

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 046500296X
• ISBN 13: 9780465002962
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 528