Skip to product information
1 of 1

Basic Books

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

Regular price $21.99 USD
Regular price Sale price $21.99 USD
Title: Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Author: Edward E Baptist
ISBN: 9780465049660
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016
Binding: Book
Language: English
Condition: New
New from the publisher

History 1307082

Publisher Description:

Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians

Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize

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

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.