What is Reddit's opinion of Half Has Never Been Told?

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Edward E. Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism is a good work with a lot of research on how the growing credit/finance industry in the 19th century basically was cycling equity from southern slaves into northern production, and the industrialization of the north was concurrent with the industrialization of slavery in the south as part of a single economic cycle.

It's a wonderful work to demonstrate that even if the North had no direct slavery, the entire United States rise to economic superpower was very closely tied to the productivity of slavery

""The goal was to have rational people who disagree come to a compromise""

In between then and now there was some other stuff going on. What kind of rational people? You world view is skewed so you can't actually see it any other way. I get it.

try reading this

The Half That's Never Been Told

It is not about color of skin or what they “African Americans” produce. Please name a corporation that a African American family owns or started that is worth billions of dollars. African Americans have not had the luxury nor the funding to start a corporation like “Walmart” (Walton Family) for example. At every stage before slavery and after slavery African Americans have been stopped by laws and white supremacy in the United States to create businesses to create wealth. African Americans have served the United States in every war and have not been treated fairly or with respect as true citizens to live the “American Dream.” People stop your whining when you are asked to simply support your fellow “American” is this case “African American business.” African Americans have worked hard to build this country as slaves. We are talking about billions of free dollars off the backs of African Americans that helped start our country’s great economy. People ask why should we support or is it racist? Please read “The Half Has Never Been Told” by Edward E. Baptist and chew on your Conscience. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465049664/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabt1_fSGXFb6Q9RTH4

don't bother.

short of it: slavers and their whipmasters got so much better at whipping slaves over the course of the antebellum period that this explains improvements in cotton yields during that era. The problem is that this isn't supported by the actual evidence. the actual evidence is that yield improvements were technological: varieties of cotton were bred that were more productive and easier to harvest

The book it comes from, Half Has Never Been Told is actually a good book because Baptiste writes fictional vignettes told from the point of view of slaves (and mixes in what little first hand accounts we have), but it's deeply important to understand that it's a work of fiction, not a work of history.

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.

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

I suggest you read this book:

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

TLDR. If the Northern States think they were morally clean, they are wrong. The North financed and actively profited from slavery.

To understand the last paragraph and how it relates, check these two books out:

• How To Be Antiracist

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

That we can't point to any entertainer with a deal that Joe is asking for is an indictment of Spotify, not Joe. Spotify is exploitative because much of Spotify's value comes from it monetizing other people's passion, time and sweat. It is practicing American capitalism.

Without realizing it, Joe is attacking the very foundation of America. He is right about it being oppression. While he does not go into underlying arguments that make him right and correct, Joe is banging away at something that can change the game for a lot of creators. I just laugh because he accidentally stumbled into the fight that all people who work should be having.

Newport papi is trying to lead the listeners to the promise land. But too many of them are so steeped in the game on the terms of the masters that they can't see that they are in chains.

As an aside, I understand why Joe is ranting against Charlamagne. Charlamagne is Samuel L Jackson from Django. He is the dude that would go tell massa that there is a rebellion brewing in the fields because slavery ending would ruin Charlamage's good position within the system.

The Half Has Never Been Told

Precisely. The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist

Feudalism declined in England around the 1500's and was replaced by economic Capitalism, which was the foundation of the Atlantic slave trade and companies chartered to populate North America to exploit its resources. A bunch of English traitors deciding they'd rather hold on to those resources than rightfully send them off to England led to the American Revolution - this, of course, being the English point of view. :)

To your point about telling the good and the bad, you're illustrating my point by merely saying, "Sure, a society where there are a bunch of slaves isn't ideal". England itself was already on on its way to ending slavery, which happened in 1807, whereas the American economy was largely driven by cotton production and the system of slavery, which was financed by the north and enacted in the south. A great economic history of slavery that explains its rise in the US is The Half Has Never Been Told - dispels the myth that the North didn't support slavery, and that slavery in the South was some kind of gentleman's enterprise.

People like to complain about the Nazis, but imagine a country that for 100 years runs a system of imprisonment camps enslaving millions of people in an enterprise that becomes the backbone of the country's entire economy, leading to a political system that fully supports and expands the country through slavery until a war is finally fought over the morality of the institution that kills 600,000 soldiers.

And then - poof! - for every subsequent generation of school children, for 150 years, all the history of that time is papered over with talk about how glorious the Revolution was, and then, "Yay! Lincoln defeated slavery!" in the 1860's. This is what Critical Race Theory is all about - teaching the reality of actual history - warts and all - instead of this mythology. And there's nothing wrong with that - every American deserves to be told the truth instead of half-truths and lies. It's time to do that, realize and reconcile with our past, fix it today, and move forward. Everyone arguing against CRT is trying to prop up the teaching of fantasy.

Years ago, I took German in high school from a teacher who'd come to America from Germany. She was an older lady, probably born around 1920, so she around for the post WWI period, rise of the Nazis, WWII, and post-war period, and you know what, she was ashamed. She knew the history because she was there and experienced what the Nazis did, and Germany itself went through a post-war period of reconciliation and restitution. But she never stepped down from that or tried to cover it up - she taught it - because she understood first hand how if we don't teach future generations the reality of and totality of wrongdoing in the past, it's going to repeat itself.

Please read this book, if you are on the fence about the righteousness of reparations.

>OP is just lying to sympathize with the traitorous slavers and to blame the government.

this seems like a deeply unfair moral imputation of OP's actual words.

it didn't read to me that OP was making a moral evaluation at all, but rather amorally saying there was (perhaps) a mechanism of repurchase that could've avoided conflict.

now, ultimately i don't think that's supportable even amorally. Ta-Nehisi Coates has covered this previouslyalthough i think his monetary objection is a stock-flow confusion and essentially wrong. the agrarian slave economy of the Southern colonies/states was not going to function nearly so well without very low cost labor, and that would have massive ramifications for Southern political power -- even under the deeply racist tenant farming that replaced slavery, the postwar South fell far behind the mercantile/industrial North in economic and political importance. Southern elites seemed to understand their situation in this way, and i doubt a mass redemption of slaves would've met their approval or been able to pass into law with a Congress representative of all the states. to be sure, Northern mercantile and banking interests had equally little interest in a grand economic restructuring of the Southern economy as their financial well-being was predicated on trade and manufacture derived from Southern goods. slavery did much to build South and North alike.

but the concept is a very old one. repurchase/redemption from bondage is a time-honored means of escaping slavery. (indeed this is why there is such frequent overlap between the language of debt and the language of slavery/freedom.) many ancient societies facilitated a regular mass redemption in the form of jubilee to prevent the accumulation of debts and debt slavery from persistently unbalancing the social structure in favor of creditors.

chattel slavery of the kind the South operated on is truly different in kind than the classical debt slavery seen more commonly in history. but that did not prevent an active abolitionist movement to redeem slaves individually from taking hold in the pre-Civil War US. modern abolitionists are continuing to redeem chattel slaves even recently. could that effort been scaled up in abstract theory (ignoring the many cultural reasons that would've prevented such a thing from happening)? almost certainly -- except of course that you can't ignore those cultural reasons. the British Empire, for example, did exactly that.

the moral implications of redeeming slaves has been the subject of serious moral inquiry -- this is not some silly invention that is obviously immoral.

so OP may be incorrect, but morally impugning OP for bringing up this historically validated concept seems cynical at best (unless there are other comments of OP's i haven't seen where he praises slavery in principle or some crazy crap).