Making Sense of Slavery
America's Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today
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In recent years, from school board meetings to the halls of Congress, Americans have engaged in fierce debates about how slavery and its legacies ought to be taught, researched, and narrated. But since the earliest days of the Republic, political leaders, abolitionists, judges, scholars, and ordinary citizens have all struggled to explain and understand the peculiar institution.
In Making Sense of Slavery, historian Scott Spillman shows that the study of slavery was a vital catalyst for the broader development of American intellectual life and politics. In contexts ranging from the plantation fields to the university classroom, Americans interpreted slavery and its afterlives through many lenses, shaping the trajectory of disciplines from economics to sociology, from psychology to history. Spillman delves deeply into the archives, and into the pathbreaking work of scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Annette Gordon-Reed, to trace how generations of Americans have wrestled with the paradox of slavery in a country founded on principles of liberty and equality.
As the debate over the place of slavery in our history rages on, Making Sense of Slavery shows that what is truly central to American history is this very debate itself.
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“Scott Spillman's work asks a simple, but necessary question: What do we think about slavery? We’ve been debating the answer for centuries. Spillman skillfully brings together a deep and wide sense of how Americans and historians have grappled with the past, present, and future of our nation stained by slavery. In an age of book banning and political polarization, Spillman shows us the stakes regarding the history of slavery could not be higher. Brilliant, biting, and timely.”Kellie Carter Jackson, author of We Refuse
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“Simply amazing. A brilliant tour d'horizon of 250 years of American thinking and writing about slavery.”James T. Campbell, author of Middle Passages
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“Scott Spillman’s remarkable book is a breathtaking survey of nearly two centuries of scholarship on slavery. Filled with insights and surprises, Making Sense of Slavery is essential reading for anyone who hopes to come to terms with America’s tortured past.”James Oakes, author of The Crooked Path to Abolition
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“Scott Spillman has written an essential book, tracing how Americans have perceived, studied, and reckoned with slavery. Starting with the early abolitionist Anthony Benezet and taking the story all the way down to the controversies over the 1619 Project, Spillman lucidly chronicles the long series of anguished and angry arguments that did not end with the Civil War, but moved into the realm of historical study, and have remained central to the way we understand both our nation and the human condition.”David A. Bell, Princeton University
- On Sale
- Mar 4, 2025
- Page Count
- 448 pages
- Publisher
- Basic Books
- ISBN-13
- 9781541602106
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