Thread by @blackrepublican

Without Slavery, Would The U.S. Be The Leading Economic Power? wbur.fm/1F0eMZj

"The idea that the forced labor of African Americans is what made [America] powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth."

#RacialSlavery

"During the middle of the 1800s, cotton became the world's largest commodity. The cheapest and best cotton came from the southern United States."

"Edward Baptist argues in his new book,"The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism," that the forced migration and subsequent harsh treatment of slaves in the cotton fields was integral to establishing the United States as a world economic power."

A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of slaves

"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.

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 intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

amazon.com/dp/046500296X/… via @amazon

@amazon "a radical new interpretation of American history" ...