“The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.” — 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
