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THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD

Name: THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD
Author: Edward E. Baptist
ISBN: 978-0-465-00296-2

SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM

by Edward E. Baptist ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2014

Though some readers may find the narrative occasionally tedious, this is a complicated story involving staggering...

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A dense, myth-busting work that pursues how the world profited from American slavery.

The story of slavery in America is not static, as Baptist (History/Cornell Univ.; Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War, 2001) points out in this exhaustive tome. It entailed wide-scale forced migrations from the lower East Coast to the South and West of the economically burgeoning United States. Following tobacco production along the Chesapeake Bay, slavery was embraced in the newly opened territories of Kentucky and Mississippi, where slaves were force-marched in coffles, separated from families, bought and sold to new owners, and then used to clear fields and plant indigo and the new cash crop, cotton. Although some advanced attempts to ban slavery—e.g., in the Northwest Ordinance—the newly hammered-out Constitution codified it by the Three-Fifths Compromise. In the name of unity, the delegates agreed with South Carolina’s John Rutledge that “religion and humanity [have] nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations.” Using the metaphor of a trussed-up giant body à la Gulliver, Baptist divides his chapters by body parts, through which he viscerally delineates the effects of the violence of slavery—e.g., “Feet” encapsulates the experience of forced migration through intimate stories, while “Right Hand” and “Left Hand” explore the insidious methods of the “enslavers” to solidify their holdings. Baptist moves chronologically, though in a roundabout fashion, often backtracking and repeating, and thoroughly examines every area affected by slavery, from New Orleans to Boston, Kansas to Cuba. He challenges the comfortable myth of “Yankee ingenuity” as our founding growth principle, showing how cotton picking drove U.S. exports and finance from 1800 to 1860—as well as the expansion of Northern industry.

Though some readers may find the narrative occasionally tedious, this is a complicated story involving staggering scholarship that adds greatly to our understanding of the history of the United States.

Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-465-00296-2

Page Count: 512

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | UNITED STATES | ETHNICITY & RACE

- PROFILES
Edward E. Baptist

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A VOICE OF REASON

HANAN ASHRAWI AND PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

by Barbara Victor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1994

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A superficial, unreliable profile of the PLO's often articulate, photogenic spokesperson during part of the Intifada, and particularly during the Madrid and Washington negotiations with Israel (199193). Victor, a novelist as well as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, maintains near the beginning of her book that Hanan Ashrawi ``was the one person who had made possible [Yasir] Arafat's presence'' on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993, when his famous ``handshake'' with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin took place. Not only does she not make a case for this extraordinary claim, but Victor demonstrates how, throughout most of 1993, the PLO leader kept Ashrawi ``in the dark'' about the secret Oslo negotiations. Her book also is riddled with the kind of errors that make one question her knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For example, Victor twice claims that the 1917 Balfour Declaration was issued in 1921; the second time, she asserts that it ``provided for two states, Israel and Palestine, to exist side by side.'' Nonsense: The declaration made no reference to any ``state,'' only to Great Britain supporting the establishment of a ``Jewish homeland'' in Palestine, which was soon to be a British mandate. Equally irritating are Victor's stylistic excesses, her use of the kind of hyperbolic prose found in ``puff'' pieces, such as her assertion that Ashrawi's ``razor-sharp responses captured world opinion every time that she faced a camera.'' Earlier this year, Ashrawi resigned from the PLO leadership to establish and head an independent Palestinian human rights monitoring group. It is this, not the media glitz she enjoyed as a PLO spokesperson, that may lend her career its real significance. Until we know whether and how Hanan Ashrawi will contribute to the humanitarian nature of a possible Palestinian state, any biography of her, particularly one as lacking in historical and biographical depth as Victor's, is premature.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-15-103968-2

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HISTORY

- BOOK REVIEW
ARMY OF ROSES
by Barbara Victor

- BOOK REVIEW
GODDESS
by Barbara Victor

- BOOK REVIEW
GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER
by Raoul Felder & Barbara Victor

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THE WAGES OF GLOBALISM

LYNDON JOHNSON AND THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN POWER

by H.W. Brands ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1994

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A convincing reassessment of Lyndon Johnson's foreign policy. Although Brands (History/Texas A&M; The Devil We Knew, 1993, etc.) admits that it is difficult to consider LBJ's record in foreign affairs without immediately thinking of the debacle in Vietnam that wrecked his presidency, that is nonetheless what he attempts to do. Coming to the Oval Office at the height of the American Century, Johnson inherited a tradition of American globalism that began with the Spanish-American War, gained momentum in WW I, and peaked after WW II, from which the United States emerged as the greatest economic and military force in the world, able to project its power around the planet. The author argues that Johnson continued in this vein and that many of his accomplishments deserve to be understood and applauded. Obsessed with Communism and the nagging question of ``Who lost Cuba,'' Johnson intervened in Vietnam and successfully invaded the Dominican Republic, ostensibly to protect American lives but in reality to prevent a supposed Communist takeover. When the Six-Day War broke out in the Middle East, Johnson could not, as Eisenhower did in the Suez crisis of 1956, force Israel to give up territory gained. He did, however, use America's coercive influence to limit the scope and duration of the war. He suffered the snub of de Gaulle ordering US troops out of France and withdrawing from NATO, but soldiers remained in Europe and he kept the alliance together. He helped halt wars between Greece and Turkey and between India and Pakistan. In many ways, Brands offers Johnson as a transitional figure between the days of American hegemony and the current era when a multipolar world often seems to confound and stymie US foreign policy. Judicious and well researched, the volume presents a good opening in the reappraisal of Johnson and his administration.