“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 instead found transcendence by displaying kindness toward other people. Through small, everyday acts that committed them… — 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 respectable white one. Such things happened in Virginia—Claiborne knew Thomas Jefferson quite well—but they were usually kept under wraps. Meanwhile, new American arrivals used capital from outside the territory to dominate business that came from New… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share
“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 African-American political and civil equality. This compact of white supremacy enabled southern whites to impose Jim Crow segregation on public space, disfranchise African-American citizens by barring them from the polls, and use the lynch-mob noose to… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share
“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 colonies from Brazil north to Virginia. Many were small in size, but all were huge in economic and political significance. In 1763, in the first Treaty of Paris, France traded all of Canada for the island… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share
“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 room. Then, wrote the traveler, each white man “took a female from the drove to lodge with him, as is the common practice.” Ten-year-old enslaved migrant John Brown saw slave trader Starling Finney and his assistants… — Edward E. Baptist Copy Share
“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
