The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation - Daina Ramey Berry

Descriere The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation - Daina Ramey Berry

\nGroundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America \nIn life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives--including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death--in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full life cycle, historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating ghost values or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools. \n \nThis book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry's exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples' experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities. \n \nA profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death. \n \nWinner of the 2018 Hamilton Book Award - from the University Coop (Austin, TX) \n \nWinner of the 2018 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize (SHEAR) \n \nWinner of the 2018 Phillis Wheatley Literary Award, from the Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage \n \nFinalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition\n

Detalii

Brand

Beacon Press

Categorie

ENSTK

EAN / GTIN

9780807067147

Magazine

1

Disponibilitate

in stock