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63rd out of 71 books
—
16 voters
The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853-1861
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822�1903) is best known for designing parks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Chicago, Boston, and the grounds of the Capitol in Washington. But before he embarked upon his career as the nation's foremost landscape architect, he was a correspondent for theNew York Times, and it was under its auspices that he journeyed through the slave states in the 1850s. Hi...more
Paperback, 716 pages
Published
August 22nd 1996
by Da Capo Press
(first published 1861)
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This was an accidental discovery for me; it came from a deceased friend's library and I wish I could thank him for it. I thumbed through the section on North Carolina and was immediately hooked. The landscape architect was a remarkably good writer and this contemporaneous account of the peculiar institution is fascinating and well worth seeking out. The book is a series of dispatches written for the New York Times, then edited for book form. Olmsted examined slavery through an economic lens, rec...more
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in Ivan Denisovitch, wrote: "There are two ends to a stick, and there's more than one way of working. If it's for human beings - make sure and do it properly. If it's for the big man - just make it look good." He was speaking of life in the Soviet gulag, but something of the same dynamic was at work, as Olmsted makes clear, in the slave societies of the South.
Olmsted has a taste for incident, an active mind, and is continually querulous over the lack of comfort and poor...more
Olmsted has a taste for incident, an active mind, and is continually querulous over the lack of comfort and poor...more
Absolutely essential for understanding the South through a non-slaveholder's eyes.
Jun 02, 2013
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