Baptist argues otherwise slavery propelled the American economy forward while on “new slave labor camp” (115) in the Mississippi valley, entrepreneurial slave masters upped productivity by deploying “systematized torture” as a “central technology” (141–42). Baptist tells “the other half of story,” a half that has been “left out of history” by southern whites who “convinced a majority of white Americans, including most historians, that slavery had been benign and that ‘states’ rights’ had been the cause of the Civil War” (xxii, 409). 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.” 1Įdward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told is the latest attempt to come to terms with slavery and its enduring legacies. 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.
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