LGM Podcast: Slavery, Confederacy, the American West
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For the latest LGM podcast, we were honored enough to have Kevin Waite of Durham University in the U.K. to talk about his new book West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire. This is a really fantastic book that looks at both how the South saw the American West as an expansion of their potential empire and how many whites in the West really wanted that. In this, we talk about the pro-slavery politics of 1850s California, the complicated place of Mormons when it comes to slavery, the many forms of unfree labor in California, and how the West and South united in opposition to Reconstruction over the shared ideology of white supremacy, even if the racial groups needed to be subjugated were different. Real great, very readable book, you should check it out.
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