Winner of the SHEAR Book Prize Honorable Mention, Avery O. Craven
Award "Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery as
powerfully." -Ari Kelman, Times Literary Supplement "[One] of the
most impressive works of American history in many years." -The
Nation "An important, arguably seminal, book...Always trenchant and
learned." -Wall Street Journal A landmark history, by the author of
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Broken Heart of
America, that shows how slavery fueled Southern capitalism. When
Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an
"empire for liberty" populated by self-sufficient white farmers.
Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by
Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into
a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered
by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves.
River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of
worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across
oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold
reconsideration dramatically alters our understanding of American
slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and
the upcoming Civil War. Walter Johnson deftly traces the
connections between the planters' pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic
commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendency.
Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and
personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of
daily life under cotton's dark dominion. We meet the confidence men
and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave
dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the
markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds
and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who
threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a
global scale. But at the center of the story are the enslaved
people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the
cotton-who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of
the American dream. "Shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the
19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of
feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on
enslaved labor." -A. O. Scott, New York Times "River of Dark Dreams
delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write
'history from the bottom up.'" -Maya Jasanoff, New York Review of
Books
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