In the teaching of American history, perhaps the most difficult lesson to convey is that slavery once held the entire country in its grip. It was not just the business of enslaved black people, slaveholders, or the South. Slavery engaged an immense geography of connected activities that no Americans could escape, whoever they were and wherever they lived. What is more, slavery does not belong only to America’s past, but is the heritage of all Americans alive today, including those of recent vintage. Slavery enthroned inequality both among free citizens and between slaves and owners and, in the
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