“Even today, most US history textbooks tell the story of the Louisiana Purchase without admitting that slave revolution in Saint-Domingue made it possible. And here is another irony. Haitians had opened 1804 by announcing their grand experiment of a society… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
“few years after Ball was herded south, a slave trader marched a coffle past the US Capitol just as a gaggle of congressmen took… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
“American” women (and a few men) complained that here, wealthy white men sometimes lived with mulatto women until it came time to marry a… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
“Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.” — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
“Within half a century after Butler sent Charles Mallory away from Fortress Monroe empty-handed, the children of white Union and Confederate soldiers united against… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
“The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
“Chains enabled another kind of violence to be done as well. Chains saved whites from worrying about placating this one’s mother, or buying that… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
“Once all the gold and silver had been thoroughly stolen, the empires found even greater sources of wealth by laying a belt of plantation… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
“One night at a tavern in Virginia’s Greenbrier County, a traveler watched as a group of traders put a coffle of people in one… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
“Many whites, now proclaiming that science proved that people of African descent were intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminal behavior, looked wistfully to… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
“But he forgot to close a lock one night, and as a newspaper reported, “the negroes rose and cut the throat of Mr. Speers,… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
“by the 1840s the North had built a complex, industrialized economy on the backs of enslaved people and their highly profitable cotton labor. Yet,… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
“Heroes deal out vengeance, wiping out insults, and in an existential sense denying their own death. In twentieth-century camps, however, Todorov found, some people… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share Image
