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Podcast: Commonwealth Club of California Podcast
Episode: Seth Rockman: A Material History of American Slavery
Description: How interdependent were the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor in pre-Civil War America?Historian and Brown University history professor Seth Rockman says the traditional way of thinking about the United States in the early 19th century—that of a nation with an industrializing North and agricultural South—overlooks the economic ties that held together the nation before the Civil War. He says it misses slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, and it fails to recognize the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South...