The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.78 (521 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0807047627 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 256 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-01-22 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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.This 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. 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. Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early AmericaIn life and in death, slaves were commod
She lives in Austin, Texas. . Daina Ramey Berry is an associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies, and the Oliver H. An award-winning historian, she is also a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Radkey Regents Fellow in History, at the University of Texas at Austin
is a fantastic book that everyone should read beyond the historian In a nutshell, this book delves into the economic value, and commodification of enslaved people (unborn, alive, and dead) in the building of our nation, the United States. Daina Berry delves deep into the archive to give birth to this ground breaking project based on primary records to show that enslaved people were valued way before they were born and long after they had died. She spent over 10 years researching through a miscellany of archives (insurance records, court documents, slave sales' rosters, and estate records,. T. C. Brayshaw said The Horrors of Slavery. Daina Berry has written a book that brings the tragedy of slavery to life. While emphasizing the monetary values of slaves at different stages in life, she explains the person story of a variety of people subjected to this evil. It is well researched and well written.. "Professor Berry has provided an important study of both the" according to E.D. Schroeder. Professor Berry has provided an important study of both the way in which slaves were valued at sale and the impact on the slaves of being sold as property. Little information has been available in either area, in part because of the difficulty in finding records and in part because of an apparent aversion by historians to the subject matter. The book is an important addition to pre-Civil War American History. Understanding more about that period helps in understanding of Jim Crow America, as well.
Reading The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will leave you with an overwhelming sense of sadness, but also with great anger that we are still failing to fully overcome this history’s legacy.”—Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History“Daina Berry has written the richest account of the many ways in which an enslaved African American’s body was bought and sold throughout her or his lifetime. Out of the certainty that their souls were pearls beyond price, black people fought to make room for their own system of human values.”—Edward E. Searing, revelatory, and vital to understanding our nation’s inequities.”—Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other S