First, this blog replaces my previous blog, thecosmoplitanlawyerblogspot.com . Second, unlike that earlier blog, the present one is primarily meant as a record of my readings. It is not meant to suggest that others will be or should be interested in what I read. And third, in a sense, it is a public diary of one who is an alien in his own American culture. A person who feels at home just about anywhere, except in his birthplace . . . America.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
"ON THE DARK UNDERSIDE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM"
Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned and '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 reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery an its role in U.S. expansion, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War." "Walter Johnson deftly trace the connections between the planters' pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendancy. 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 Johnson tells 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.").