As Baptist makes clear, his book is about “how slavery constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world” (xxii) it reveals the violence, theft, and modernity of American slavery and what it meant for those who survived the rapid expansion of racial slavery during the first half of the nineteenth century. that has yet to be undone.” Whether in the 1830s, 1960s, or today, slavery remains a touchstone in the “search for social justice on the critical issue of race.”Įdward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told is the latest attempt to come to terms with slavery and its enduring legacies. 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.Slavery is “the tough stuff of American memory.” As Saidiya Hartman memorably writes, African American bondage “established a measure of man and a ranking of life.
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. 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. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. Craven Prize from the Organization of American HistoriansĪ groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved peopleĪmericans 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.
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