Of Blood and Sweat
Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth
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Narrated by:
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Julian Thomas
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By:
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Clyde W. Ford
About this listen
“Ford’s overlap of past and present, narrative and commentary is masterful, and makes this volume all the more valuable to those readers wise enough to allow the past to inform the future. Of Blood and Sweat is a myth-busting work of genius that will stand as the last word on this vital subject for a long time to come.”—Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, New York Times bestselling author of A Slave in the White House and The Original Black Elite
In this, provocative, timely, and painstakingly researched book, the award-winning author of Think Black tells the story of how Black labor helped to create and sustain the wealth of the white one percent throughout American history.
Clyde W. Ford uses the lives of individual Black men and women as a lens to explore the role they have played in creating American institutions of power and wealth—in agriculture, politics, jurisprudence, law enforcement, culture, medicine, financial services, and many other fields—while not being allowed to fully participate or share in the rewards. Today, activists have taken the struggle for racial equity and justice to the streets. Of Blood and Sweat goes back through time to excavate the roots of this struggle, from pre-colonial Africa through post-Civil War America. As Ford reveals, in tracing the history of almost any major American institution of power and wealth you’ll find it was created by Black Americans, or created to control them.
Painstakingly researched and documented, Of Blood and Sweat is a compelling look at the past that holds broad implications for present-day calls for racial equity, racial justice, and the abolishment of systemic racism, and offers invaluable insight into our understanding of Black history and the story of America.
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American Slavery, American Freedom
- By: Edmund S. Morgan
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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"If it is possible to understand the American paradox, the marriage of slavery and freedom, Virginia is surely the place to begin," writes Edmund S. Morgan in American Slavery, American Freedom, a study of the tragic contradiction at the core of America. Morgan finds the key to this central paradox in the people and politics of the state that was both the birthplace of the revolution and the largest slaveholding state in the country.
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Explaining the great American contradiction
- By Roger on 09-16-14
By: Edmund S. Morgan
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The World That Made New Orleans
- From Spanish Silver to Congo Square
- By: Ned Sublette
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Offering a new perspective on the unique cultural influences of New Orleans, this entertaining history captures the soul of the city and reveals its impact on the rest of the nation. Focused on New Orleans' first century of existence, a comprehensive, chronological narrative of the political, cultural, and musical development of Louisiana's early years is presented.
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great book; terrible "performance"
- By WGNYC on 11-28-17
By: Ned Sublette
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Dawn of Detroit
- A Chronicle of Bondage and Freedom in the City of the Straits
- By: Tiya Miles
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Most Americans believe that slavery was a creature of the South, and that Northern states and territories provided stops on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. In this paradigm-shifting book, celebrated historian Tiya Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest's iconic city: Detroit. In this richly researched and eye-opening book, Miles has pieced together the experience of the unfree - both native and African American - in the frontier outpost of Detroit.
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Great!
- By Melissa Eisner on 05-30-18
By: Tiya Miles
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African Founders
- How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals
- By: David Hackett Fischer
- Narrated by: Lamarr Gulley
- Length: 35 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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African Founders explores the little-known history of how enslaved people from different regions of Africa interacted with colonists of European origins to create new regional cultures in the colonial United States. The Africans brought with them linguistic skills, novel techniques of animal husbandry and farming, and generations-old ethical principles, among other attributes. This startling history reveals how much our country was shaped by these African influences in its early years, producing a new distinctly American culture.
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faux vocalizations
- By Porter on 08-19-22
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The War Before the War
- Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War
- By: Andrew Delbanco
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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For decades after its founding, America was really two nations—one slave, one free. There were many reasons why this composite nation ultimately broke apart, but the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the "united" states was actually a lie. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation based on the principle of human equality was in fact a prison-house in which millions of Americans had no rights.
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Great promise greater disappointment
- By Amazon Customer on 12-09-18
By: Andrew Delbanco
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New England Bound
- Slavery and Colonization in Early America
- By: Wendy Warren
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In a work that fundamentally recasts the history of colonial America, Wendy Warren shows how the institution of slavery was inexorably linked with the first century of English colonization of New England. While most histories of slavery in early America confine themselves to the Southern colonies and the Caribbean, New England Bound forcefully widens the historical aperture to include the entirety of English North America.
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Don't waste your time or money
- By Dis Carded on 09-03-17
By: Wendy Warren
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100 Amazing Facts About the Negro
- By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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With élan and erudition - and with winning enthusiasm - Henry Louis Gates Jr. gives us a corrective yet loving homage to Rogers' work. Relying on the latest scholarship, Gates leads us on a romp through African, diasporic, and African American history in question-and-answer format. Among the 100 questions: Who were Africa's first ambassadors to Europe? Who was the first black president in North America? Did Lincoln really free the slaves? Who was history's wealthiest person? What percentage of white Americans have recent African ancestry?
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great book
- By Anthony Costello on 06-14-18
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Empire's Crossroads
- A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day
- By: Carrie Gibson
- Narrated by: Romy Nordlinger
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Ever since Christopher Columbus stepped off the Santa Maria onto what is today San Salvador, in the Bahamas, and announced that he had arrived in the Orient, the Caribbean has been a stage for projected fantasies and competition between world powers. In Empire’s Crossroads, British American historian Carrie Gibson traces the story of this coveted area from the northern rim of South America up to Cuba, and from discovery through colonialism to today, offering a vivid, panoramic view of this complex region and its rich, important history.
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Careless production mars storytelling
- By Brenda Thomas on 03-31-16
By: Carrie Gibson
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The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South (and Why it Will Rise Again)
- By: Clint Johnson
- Narrated by: Dianna Dorman
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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With its emphasis on traditional values, family, faith, military service, good manners, small government, and independent-minded people, the South should certainly rise again. Far from being the backwater of prejudice and ignorance that the liberal media would have you believe, the South has always been the center of American culture.
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Tubby Bearded Guy reference earned an extra star
- By Ed on 09-30-17
By: Clint Johnson
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Jacksonland
- President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab
- By: Steve Inskeep
- Narrated by: Steve Inskeep
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Jacksonland is the thrilling narrative history of two men - President Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief John Ross - who led their respective nations at a crossroads of American history. Five decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy. Jacksonland is their story.
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Fantastic and Thoughtful
- By Elizabeth Westbrook on 05-05-16
By: Steve Inskeep
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A Little History of the World
- By: E. H. Gombrich
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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E. H. Gombrich's world history, an international best seller now available in English for the first time, is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements, and an acute witness to its frailties.
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an enlightening book; very well read
- By A.B.Oxford on 06-03-06
By: E. H. Gombrich
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The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson and the Story That Sparked the Civil War
- By: Jared A. Brock
- Narrated by: Ryan Vincent Anderson
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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This sweeping biography about the man who was the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is an epic tale of courage and bravery in the face of unimaginable trials. The Road to Dawn tells the improbable story of Josiah Henson - a dynamic, driven man with exceptional intelligence and unyielding principles, who overcame incredible odds to escape from slavery and improve the lives of hundreds of freedmen throughout his long life. He was immortalized by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.
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Great book and very informative
- By plcd22 on 07-04-18
By: Jared A. Brock
What listeners say about Of Blood and Sweat
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mary
- 04-18-22
Ford opens our eyes....
Clyde Ford opens our eyes to the history we have been too comfortable leaving covered for too long. A must read for those wanting to understand the past, digest the uncomfortable realities, and continue marching forward to repair and equality for our future.
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Thoroughly researched and masterfully constructed
Christians and Muslins and Jews — oh my! And pirates! And kings and queens on multiple European thrones.
These are just some of the nefarious characters who helped create and entrench — and became the first to cash in on — the massively profitable international enterprise of slavery. Through deep research directed by a uniquely insightful perspective, author Clyde Ford follows the money all the way back to the beginning, before the institution even came to America. Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth, documents with sobering clarity how slavery was very consciously baked into the institutions and the very founding documents of the United States, much as Black Americans’ literal blood and sweat is baked into this nation’s actual soil.
Further, he provides a productive reframing of the reparations conversation. Whether or not the idea of reparations was a concept in the British legal tradition from which American legal tradition grew, the idea of “freedom dues” definitely was. They were customary after a period of servitude, and indentured servitude was the only kind going before the aforementioned bad guys got with tobacco planters and others to decide Africans could be/should be subject to servitude for life. Ford details in the book how the founding fathers departed from tradition in this instance to create laws more supportive of slavery.
This masterwork also includes eye-opening little-known information and contextualization including horticultural details about tobacco and cotton, the crops that built the union; historical facts about the world of shipping that transported Black bodies; untold stories of courage and heroism through abolition, the Civil War and after the war; and how railroad companies owned slaves and how actual slaves built railways and bridges and other key infrastructure.
Most chilling are the book’s stories of how the South tried and succeeded in establishing a post-slavery reality as close as humanly possible to actual slavery, using both judicial and extra-judicial means, including unbelievable campaigns of murder and terror carried out by groups including the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts, and how the North and federal government again and again either turned a blind eye or actually conspired in efforts to disenfranchise, dispossess and otherwise oppress former slaves and their descendants. Ford traces patterns that are irrefutable and can point a way to achieving the justice needed for this nation to ever have any hope of healing and peace.
Narrator Julian Thomas did a mostly excellent job reading the Audible edition, but he did get one thing wrong (as do many others, including Mary-Louise Parker in the 2010 film “Red”): the pronunciation of Mobile, Alabama. As the daughter of a proud native of that port city on the Gulf of Mexico, I feel it my duty to let him and everyone know that you don’t say it like a portable phone, nor like someone who can really move. The correct pronunciation is “mo-BEEL.”
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- A. Volzer
- 07-21-22
a new minimum standard
this is the history book on the topic of black slavery and US national identity in the US that sets a new minimum standard. when these stories are absent in the official public record and education system, and censorship runs rampant, then the context of current events is lost. the authors commentary and self reflection on the material in light of current events is the type of scholarship americans should demand of their academics- dogged devotion to emotional blindness was always a tactic by the white establishment to normalize horror.
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