The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Pellagra: Down Not Out If Down and Out (and South) – Part 2

“…Furthermore "divide and rule" policies by elites and "dog whistle" racial politics were encouraged on the plantations and thereafter stalled many worker class rebellions. More subtly on Haiti in 2008 food price increases were bailed out with strings attached that are damaging longer term for the nutritionally weakened poor-(even though they were the base of agriculture and capitalism in general)-all old and new methods that create superficial frictions that include pitching disadvantaged racial and tribal groups against each other [96][97][98][99]. This is now known as the "Southern Strategy" though moved North with the mass great migrations of African Americans after the Civil War (Underground Railroad) and is a "Pluto Populism" and "Racecraft" and often evangelical and nationalistic policy with vote gerrymandering and other suppressions much copied (including ironically by the party of Abraham Lincoln) to this day.…”

‘Money does not stink’ – Accounting and slavery

“…13. Baptist (2015) claims that measuring the amount of cotton picked, the use of 'pushing systems', and whipping slaves for failing to meet new standards was common and helped explain major productivity gains on Southern plantations in the 1800s. However, Olmstead and Rhode (2018) sharply criticise both the underlying evidence of widespread use of a 'pushing system' or whether it could actually function in agricultural conditions where daily productivity was likely to vary due to weather, crop conditions, or other matters unconnected to the slaves' efforts.…”

Afterword: Medium America and the grounds of a transnational history of farm media

“…In all, the history of US agriculture is another name for the rugged, even ruthless development, creation, and shaping of surplus stores of landed calories, fuel, and life: to that end, perhaps, the United States may yet acknowledge that freedom, perhaps, its most contested and communicated value globally, was first given meaning by Black Americans once enslaved in the name of extracting profit from the soil of sugar and cotton. The story of American progress traces its roots to the lives of rural Black Americans such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Fannie Lou Hamer, and so many other authors of American freedom began their lives working fields as enslaved people or sharecroppers (Baptist, 2014;Berry, 2017;Johnson, 2013;Rana, 2014)-and the Filipino farm workers championed by Cezar Chavez and Mexican National Farmworkers Association in California sharpens questions for whom, exactly, American freedom tolls. Now, we arrive at what this afterword dubs the transnational problems of "medium America" in agricultural media studies: by "medium America," we mean to identify a territory of no less than 40% of non-coastal North American landmass bounded by the Rockies and Appalachian mountains running from central Canada through the center of the United States into central Mexico (and beyond), and dub this vague geographic swath "medium" in reference both to its central status between coasts and its curious doubled role in media and communication, where its media contributions are at once routinely sidelined and highly generative.…”