The Half Has Never Been Told

Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

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By Edward E. Baptist

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$15.99

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$20.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around October 25, 2016. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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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On Sale
Oct 25, 2016
Page Count
560 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780465097685

Edward E. Baptist

About the Author

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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