Listen to the entire program with Sonali Kolhatkar<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"\/home\/graphics\/ed_baptist_book.jpg\")
The fatal shooting of 18 year old African American teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, has prompted discussions in our media about racial inequalities that have long been neglected, and that continue to persist in a country whose power was built on the foundations of slavery. <\/p>\n
Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer for The Atlantic, had already famously raised the issue of reparations, writing that the US needs, \u201ca national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. \u2026 Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.\u201d In fact, the part of US history that explains how this country’s economic might was built on the institution of slavery has often been ignored, and never truly been documented in detail. <\/p>\n
Historian Edward Baptist meticulously details that untold history. In his new book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Baptist points out that the myth of the static plantation, inefficient at generating profits, obscures a great forced migration particularly in the decades 1790 to 1860 during which the cotton commodities flourished via slavery. <\/p>\n
The book has been widely praised by scholars and publishers alike. But not everyone is pleased with this telling of history. The influential British magazine, the Economist, wrote, \u201cMr. Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.\u201d Shortly after, The Economist retracted the review, saying that indeed, \u201cSlavery was an evil system.\u201d<\/p>\n
GUEST: Ed Baptist, Associate Professor of History and Dean of Carl Becker House at Cornell University. His book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism has just been published by Basic Books, and he has another new book that he co-authored with Louis Hyman called American Capitalism: A Reader <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The fatal shooting of 18 year old African American teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, has prompted discussions in our media about racial inequalities that have long been neglected, and that continue to persist in a country whose power was built on the foundations of slavery. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer for The Atlantic, had already […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-program","category-featured-book"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41476,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41467\/revisions\/41476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}