The Half Has Never Been Told Summary

Edward E. Baptist is an American scholastic and author. He is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, situated in Ithaca, New York, where he specializes in the history of 19th-century United States in the South. The book I read written by him was The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. As historian Edward Baptist uncovers in The Half Has Never Been Told, the extension of slavery in the initial eight decades after American independence drove the advancement and modernization of the United States. In the range of a solitary lifetime, the South developed from a thin seaside segment of exhausted tobacco manors to a mainland cotton domain, and the United States developed into an industrial, modern, and capitalist economy. Until the Civil War,
The book is divided into eleven chapters and each were named after a body part such as feet, heads, right hand, left hand, etc. These are definitely interesting chapter titles because it caught my eyes instantly when I saw it. However, the author didn’t have the book in geological sequence. For instance, chapter one Feet is the story from 1783 to 1810, but chapter two Heads is the story from 1791 to 1815. The constant jumping back and forth confuses me when it comes to organizing information. Therefore, Baptist’s work itself is magnificent yet how he present it hinders the communication of his ideas.
All in all, I do recommend The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist for others to read if they are interested in the history of slavery and those ones who have hard times falling asleep because this book is hard to keep up with if you’re not interested in the material