Explores the causes and consequences of the 18th-century conflict across North and South America, with roots in a contract to supply African slaves to the rich colonies of the Spanish Empire, that laid the groundwork for the later French and Indian War and the American Revolution a generation later.

Chronicles the story of the last Africans brought illegally to the United States on the Clotilda in 1860. 1859. The transatlantic slave trade has been banned for more than fifty years, and the South is facing the threat of a civil war. Timothy Maeher resents the government interference in his right to make a living. Making a bet that he can smuggle enslaved Africans into the United States without being caught, he commissions the Clotilda, and brings...

"Joining the ranks of Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Zora Neale Hurston's rediscovered classic Barracoon, an immersive and revelatory history of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to land on US soil, told through the stories of its survivors-the last documented survivors of any slave ship-whose lives diverged and intersected in profound ways"--

"In The Ledger and the Chain, prize-winning historian Joshua D. Rothman tells the disturbing story of the Franklin and Armfield company and the men who built it into the largest and most powerful slave trading company in the United States. In so doing, he reveals the central importance of the domestic slave trade to the development of American capitalism and the expansion of the American nation. Few slave traders were more successful than Isaac Franklin,...