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开 本: 16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780345467836
from exhaustive histories to bestselling novels. But the North’s
profit from–indeed, dependence on–slavery has mostly been a
shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. In this startling
and superbly researched new book, three veteran New England
journalists demythologize the region of America known for tolerance
and liberation, revealing a place where thousands of people were
held in bondage and slavery was both an economic dynamo and a
necessary way of life.
Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the Triangle Trade of
molasses, rum, and slaves that lucratively linked the North to the
West Indies and Africa; discloses the reality of Northern empires
built on profits from rum, cotton, and ivory–and run, in some
cases, by abolitionists; and exposes the thousand-acre plantations
that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are
eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from
slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line–including Nathaniel Gordon of
Maine, the only slave trader sentenced to die in the United States,
who even as an inmate of New York’s infamous Tombs prison was
supported by a shockingly large percentage of the city; Patty
Cannon, whose brutal gang kidnapped free blacks from Northern
states and sold them into slavery; and the Philadelphia doctor
Samuel Morton, eminent in the nineteenth-century field of “race
science,” which purported to prove the inferiority of African-born
black people.
Culled from long-ignored documents and reports–and bolstered by
rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period
drawings–Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that
actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on
America’s past. Expanded from the celebrated Hartford Courant
special report that the Connecticut Department of Education sent to
every middle school and high school in the state (the original work
is required readings in many college classrooms,) this new book is
sure to become a must-read reference everywhere.
From the Hardcover edition.
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