Kevin Waite, "West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire" (UNC Press, 2021)

New Books in African American Studies · Jul 21, 2021 · 40m

The geography of American slavery was continental, argues Dr. Kevin Waite, an assistant professor at Durham University, in West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (UNC Press, 2021). Rather than being confined to the South, the institution of slavery infected North America as the American empire expanded across the Mississippi River, including places often thought of as "free" states, such as California. Slaveholders saw territories in the far West as zones of political control, supportive of slavery in the South even when relatively small numbers of people were…