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.