Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today

Historian Spillman has penned a highly readable intellectual history of the study of enslavement in the United States. He covers the over 250 years of history spanning the American Revolution through the 1619 Project, focusing on individual scholars and thinkers instead of broader popular or cultural engagement, such as through newspapers or fiction. His book shows that the 18th century featured a potent mix of evangelical Christianity, Enlightenment philosophy, and (pseudo)science, with white men who were intellectuals invoking history, climate, biology, and faith to rationalize or denounce enslavement. The 19th century saw the rise of academic disciplines and methods—history, sociology, economics, empirical evidence—though many Southerners and the Lost Cause movement depicted enslavement as a positive. Over the course of the 20th century, a more varied intelligentsia, coupled with the rise of modern research universities and new methods of historical and anthropological analysis, transformed academic research on slavery. In the 1990s, the study of enslavement surged into the public consciousness as universities, museums, and other institutions confronted their pasts. In the 2000s, there were public debates about potential reparations to the descendants of enslaved people.