Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Johnson, Walter (1967-....)
Titre(s) : River of dark dreams [Texte imprimé] : slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom / Walter Johnson
Publication : Cambridge, Massachusetts : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013
Description matérielle : 526 p. ; 25 cm
Comprend : Introduction: Boom ; Jeffersonian visions and nightmares in Louisiana ; The Panic
of 1835 ; The steamboat sublime ; Limits to capital ; The runaway's river ; Dominion
; "The empire of the white man's will" ; The carceral landscape ; The Mississippi
Valley in the time of cotton ; Capital, cotton, and free trade ; Tales of Mississippian
empire ; The material limits of "Manifest Destiny" ; "The grey-eyed man of destiny"
; The ignominious effort to reopen the slave trade.
Note(s) : Includes bibliographical references (pages 423-508) and index
This work looks at the history of the Mississippi River Valley in the nineteenth century
and the economy that developed there, powered by steam engines and slave labor. When
Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an "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. This book 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 and its role in U.S. expansionism,
global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War. Here the author traces the connections
between the planters' pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern
schemes for global ascendency. 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 the
author 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
Sujet(s) : Coton -- Industrie et commerce -- Mississippi, Vallée basse du (États-Unis) -- 19e siècle
Esclavage -- Mississippi, Vallée basse du (États-Unis) -- 19e siècle
Relations interethniques -- Mississippi, Vallée basse du (États-Unis) -- 19e siècle
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780674045552 (alkaline paper). - ISBN 0674045556 (alkaline paper)
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb43639075m
Notice n° :
FRBNF43639075
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)
