Reddit reviews The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Except that's fucking nonsense. Actual historians, not bullshit blogs, have detailed how slave capital was the key to fueling growth in both the North and the South. Why do you think New York city supported the South during the war? They were making bank off the insuring of slaves, finishing goods whose raw materials were produced by slaves, etc.

Here's an academic source.

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15556.html

Here's a more popular style source, but one written by an actual historian.

https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664

Here's another.

https://www.amazon.com/Business-Slavery-Rise-American-Capitalism/dp/0300192002

Guten tag OP!

Glad to hear you're enjoying reading about Kansas history! Have you also been reading about the history of John Brown and abolitionism? That is an interesting story as well.

You mention wanting to better understand the history of the north and south and how it led to the Civil War. You are exactly right that the North wasn't some beacon of abolitionism - in fact, the North was complicit making money off of slavery, and in the expansion of slavery in the south from the very beginnings of the country.

A great book that will help you understand this, and how it led to the Civil War - and strife in places like Kansas / Missouri / Nebraska later - is "The Half Has Never Been Told". It's an economic history of slavery and it's expansion from the founding of the US through the beginning of the Civil War.

https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664

This is a really great book on how slavery made America what it is today https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=the+half+has+never+been+told&qid=1562914097&s=gateway&sr=8-1

After listening to it on Audible I'm convinced that without slavery America would be nowhere near as powerful and influential today. It is a horrible stain upon our nation. And something that all of us who live here need to learn to come to terms with.

No. They tortured slaves to increase productivity, and guess what? it worked.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the notion of "personal responsibility." A notion that, for many conservatives, seems to break through the clouds and let the heaven shine in. I want you to question, for a moment, this way of thinking.

This value is certainly grounded in something very real and true. We recognize that if people are not generally responsible this whole world will fall apart. Everyone needs to be a responsible person. They need to wake up and go to work and they need to take care of their children and possessions. They need to hold to a budget and have the will to deny themselves pleasure when it's in their own long term best interest. Someone who hasn't accomplished these habits is someone we would consider "immature" or childlike. In other words, they never learned, they never had to face punishment and "learn better."

We've also experienced personally moments in our lives where a lazy friend or relative has dropped the ball, made poor or reckless decisions, and as a result, caused us to suffer through no fault of our own.

I think that conservatives tend to take this character of immaturity, that anecdotally is certainly true of some immature people, and project it onto the poor populace at large, as well as anyone who has a grievance that they don't recognize as valid. (what grievances they do recognize, it turns out, has a lot to do with their own ingroup vs an outgroup, involving race and gender and nationality, etc, but that's another issue).

The result is that something true on a small intimate scale is mapped onto things that are much much larger and more complicated, like "black culture" and "black history." This leads to a very wrong narrative.

The idea that there might be something such as structures of power, or social and economic ideologies that perpetuate racism, can be dismissed as imaginary based on this simple narrative. Black poverty can instead be explained through a lack of "personal responsibility."

As evidence to back things up, you and other conservatives provide singular examples of people who have "beaten the odds," and pulled themselves up. Not all blacks were slaves, and not all do live or have lived in poverty. Isn't it the case that some black people are more well off than some white people? (Without asking, why are the odds so bad to begin with?)

Even though statistically, blacks have suffered and continue to suffer form poverty levels far beyond whites, the fact that some have beaten the odds prove that it's not impossible. How bad can discrimination really be?

Also, Asians! The reason we know why this whole business of racial decriminalization is imaginary is because Asians actually have higher per capital earning than even whites. Why? They work hard and they take advantage of the opportunities available to everyone in this country. And other ethnic groups were discriminated against as well? What about the Irish, Catholics, Slavs, or Jews?

This leads to the final claim, that life in general is hard. It should be, it has to be, otherwise we'll all become soft. And what happens when you have soft people? They become like children. They need to be taken care of. To only way to turn children into adult is to deny them. To force them to work harder, to appreciate what they have, to take personal responsibility. All of this is true when it comes to raising children, or dealing with a family black sheep, but when this is easily mapped onto large swaths of the population as an explanation for poverty and crime, well, we've short circuited.

(in fact, conservative policy tends to have the opposite effect, it actually gives people less ability to make better choices. Choices are not made abstractly, they are made by an embodied individual, and people already living in poverty live under stress, making choices you'll never have to make. And black people especially have lived under low level but constant psychological disparagement. This is changing, but to get a sense of it historically, Read Native Son, or anything James Baldwin, or The Souls of Black Folks).

Conservatives tend to think, aren't all these claims explaining black poverty really just an excuse? An excuse for a lack of personal responsibility? Typically what then gets blamed is "black culture."

I can see how this is a compelling narrative, especially if you are allergic to guilt or shame, but the reason why most of this is to me bullshit, or entirely irrelevant to policy, is because it ignores the specificity of black history. Every group that has faced discrimination in the US has a distinct history and that history matters. You can't just say well one race did fine while another one has floundered, so we can cross off race as a variable.

You have to look at each ethnic group's history to see what happened. Each story is complicated, and the real story of African Americans is incredibly complex. It's also probably the most interesting aspect of American history, to me at least.

In the case of both the Irish and the Jews, they eventually were able to disappear into whiteness. This book is especially telling: https://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415963095

as well as this one: https://www.amazon.com/Blackface-White-Noise-Immigrants-Hollywood/dp/0520213807

For both, their assimilation was aided by engaging in the national past time of discriminating against, you guessed it, black people. Setting themselves in opposition to them.

Whiteness as a category has been incredibly essential to American identity. This is argued famously in The Wages of Whiteness: https://www.amazon.com/Wages-Whiteness-Making-American-Working/dp/1844671453/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+wages+of+whiteness&qid=1567617090&s=books&sr=1-1

Basically, the book argues that American's came to be able to accept their position as wage laborers by identifying with whiteness, being able to contrast their position with that of slaves. At least they weren't slaves! At least they were white, at least they were better than someone.

This psychological drama has played out in politics and history ever since. I could go on and on and on. You might dismiss these books, and these claims, but you shouldn't. You should read and evaluate them for yourself. They are well sourced.

Basically, if there's one thing to take away here, it's that you should bracket the narrative that you have come to believe in, and you should open yourself to reading actual quality history about the black experience and race relations in this country.

A good place to start might be this book: https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664

And if you want to find some free pdfs of these books. This is the go to site: https://libgen.is/

Just search, the books are in there.

Maybe something that you could read later on.

The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist
https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664

It's primarily about slavery, but it gives a LOT of context to the westward expansion and the role that slavery played in it, and that both combined played to initiate the Civil War. So basically it covers the social, political and economic history from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War.