Every writer of history wants to craft a work that sticks to the ribs of the reader, and no meal does that better than one made from sacred cows. That’s what John Samuel Harpham aims to do in The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery . Using an array of texts, ranging from traveler accounts and maps to “compendia of classical wisdom” and philosophy , the author examines ancient and early-modern writing to explain “the surprise expressed by a number of antebellum writers that they would need to defend the practice of slavery at all, since it seemed to them to be an ancient tradition handed down from the remote past.”

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