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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Slavery & emancipation
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Scars on the Land - An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Hardcover)
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Scars on the Land - An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (Hardcover)
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They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice
marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they
lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the
Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from
the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and
endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the
fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps
to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent
plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to
freedom. Scars on the Land is the first comprehensive history of
American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally
formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern
landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in
the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had
profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on
outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much
labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw
the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects
once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the
leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile
ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and
fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On
its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged
with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While
environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no
environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars
manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell
victim to the slave owner's lash. Although typically treated
separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in
complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period
of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice.
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