How Slavery Shaped our Country: A Reading List from Clint Smith

 Clint Smith, author of "How the Word is Passed" and host of the new Crash Course series about black American history,  put together this reading list about slavery. 

He says these books helped him to understand how the history of slavery shaped our country. He notes that it is "by no means an exhaustive list" and says that "the scholarship on slavery is deep and rich and remarkable and one could make a list that truly goes on forever."

• "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight
• "The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation" by  Daina Ramey Berry
• "In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863" by Leslie M. Harris
• "Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market" by Walter Johnson
• "Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth" by Kevin Levin
• "Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past" by Ana Lucia Araujo
• "Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America" by Ira Berlin
• "They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South" by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
• "Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South" by Kenneth Stampp
• "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era" by James M. McPherson
• "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery" by Eric Foner
• "Those Who Labor for My Happiness: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello" by Lucia C. Stanton
• "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism" by Edward P. Baptiste
• "Capitalism and Slavery" by Eric Williams
• "Empire of Cotton: A Global History" by Sven Beckert
• "The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition" by Manisha Sinha
• "Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777-1865" by Patrick Rael
• "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family" by Annette Gordon-Reed
• "New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan" by Jill Lepore
• "Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge" by Erica Armstrong Dunbar
• "Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World" by David Brion Davis
• "Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life" by Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields
• "The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics" by James Oakes
• "Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World" by Jessica Marie Johnson
• "Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies" edited by John W. Blassingame