Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Wow! This was one of those books I found myself carrying around from room to room, so impatient was I to resume it after interruptions. Maybe the material is familiar to serious students of American history, but for somebody like me this book was a revelation, showing how hugely significant slavery (both in the Americas and in Africa itself) was for the economies and lifestyles of the northern states. The material assembled here is utterly fascinating, and the writing is condensed and pointed, with telling choices of anecdote or quotation in almost every paragraph. The book is much more of a page turner than most histories I have read. Maybe it's because the writers are professional journalists, people whose daily job it is, after all, to make information accessible and interesting to the average guy. I also get the sense the writers were deeply moved by the material, and eager to share it. The book isn't written in a straight chronological form, but organized according to topic (for example, a slave revolt in colonial NYC, or the hounding of a Connecticut woman who ran a pre-Civil War school for blacks, or the kidnapping of freed slaves from the North, or the thoroughly horrible ivory trade's beneficial impact on two Connecticut towns), and the writers, skillfully shifting their gaze back and forth in time, are quite masterful at showing how the past leads to the present. When I had finished reading I had a much deeper understanding of slavery's power and significance. The book itself is very handsome, not too bulky to hold, inset with many well-placed illustrations - not all grouped in a center section, as they are in so many histories and biographies. My one quibble is that some of the maps and reproduced newspaper clippings, etc., are too small to be read easily without a magnifying glass.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
Slavery in the South has been documented in volumes ranging from exhaustive histories to bestselling novels. But the North's profit from–indeed, dependence on–slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. In this startling and superbly researched new book, three veteran New England journalists demythologize the region of America known for tolerance and liberation, revealing a place where thousands of people were held in bondage and slavery was both an economic dynamo and a necessary way of life. Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that lucratively linked the North to the West Indies and Africa; discloses the reality of Northern empires built on profits from rum, cotton, and ivory–and run, in some cases, by abolitionists; and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line–including Nathaniel Gordon of Maine, the only slave trader sentenced to die in the United States, who even as an inmate of New York's infamous Tombs prison was supported by a shockingly large percentage of the city; Patty Cannon, whose brutal gang kidnapped free blacks from Northern states and sold them into slavery; and the Philadelphia doctor Samuel Morton, eminent in the nineteenth-century field of "race science," which purported to prove the inferiority of African-born black people.Culled from long-ignored documents and reports–and bolstered by rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period drawings–Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on America's past. Expanded from the celebrated Hartford Courant special report that the Connecticut Department of Education sent to every middle school and high school in the state (the original work is required readings in many college classrooms,) this new book is sure to become a must-read reference everywhere.From the Hardcover edition.
Get 32% OFF
0 comments:
Post a Comment