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Description of  Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery

0226723453 pdf An eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor. The industrializing North and the agricultural Souththats how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slaverys long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goodsthe shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the Southhistorian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americanswhite and Black, male and female, enslaved and freeacross an expanding nation. By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slaverya slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South. Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Read more