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Season One | Episode 2
Episode Two: Sold Down the River
Hosted by Dan Gediman. With Vanessa Holden, Joshua Rothman, Sharon Murphy, Patrick Lewis, Kevin Outterson, Bodley Stites, and featuring Mark Forman, Susan Linville, and Alec Volz.
Kentucky was an important hub of America’s internal slave trade, with fortunes made by slave traders and those who invested in enslaved people as commodities. We hear from members of a white family that descend from a Louisville slave trader and learn how integral slavery was to their wealth and to the economy of the state of Kentucky. Episode Transcript
Dr. Vanessa M. Holden
Vanessa M. Holden is an assistant professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.
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Vanessa M. Holden is an assistant professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Holden’s current book project, tentatively titled, Surviving Southampton: Gender, Community, Resistance and Survival During the Southampton Rebellion of 1831(University of Illinois Press), explores the contributions that African American women and children, free and enslaved, made to the Southampton Rebellion of 1831, also called Nat Turner’s Rebellion.
Dr. Holden’s work and writing has been published in Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Perspectives on History, Process: A Blog for American History, and The Rumpus. She also blogs for Black Perspectives and The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History.
In addition to her work on enslaved women and slave rebellion, Dr. Holden also co-organizes the Queering Slavery Working Group (#QSWG) with Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University). Her second project, Forming Intimacies: Queer Kinship and Resistance in the Antebellum American Atlantic, will focus on same gender loving individuals and American slavery.
Dr. Holden also serves as a faculty adviser or consultant on a number of public history and digital humanities projects including: Freedom on the Move (a digital archive of runaway slave adds); Black Horsemen of the Kentucky Turf (an exhibit chronicling the intersecting histories of African Americans and the horse industry in Kentucky), and a grant project aimed at bringing a driving tour and museum to Southampton County, Virginia, that interprets the Southampton Rebellion.
Find her on Twitter @drvholden.
Dr. Holden’s work and writing has been published in Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Perspectives on History, Process: A Blog for American History, and The Rumpus. She also blogs for Black Perspectives and The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History.
In addition to her work on enslaved women and slave rebellion, Dr. Holden also co-organizes the Queering Slavery Working Group (#QSWG) with Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University). Her second project, Forming Intimacies: Queer Kinship and Resistance in the Antebellum American Atlantic, will focus on same gender loving individuals and American slavery.
Dr. Holden also serves as a faculty adviser or consultant on a number of public history and digital humanities projects including: Freedom on the Move (a digital archive of runaway slave adds); Black Horsemen of the Kentucky Turf (an exhibit chronicling the intersecting histories of African Americans and the horse industry in Kentucky), and a grant project aimed at bringing a driving tour and museum to Southampton County, Virginia, that interprets the Southampton Rebellion.
Find her on Twitter @drvholden.
Dr. Joshua D. Rothman
Joshua D. Rothman is a Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Alabama.
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Joshua D. Rothman received his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, and he is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Alabama, where he specializes in the histories of slavery, the South, and nineteenth-century America. He is the author of several books, and is currently completing a manuscript tentatively titled “The Ledger and the Chain: A Biography of the Domestic Slave Trade”.
Dr. Sharon A. Murphy
Sharon Ann Murphy is a professor of history at Providence College in Providence, RI, and the author of Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America.
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Sharon Ann Murphy is a professor of history at Providence College in Providence, RI. She is the author of Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America (2010, Johns Hopkins University Press), winner of the 2012 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history, and Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic (2017, Johns Hopkins University Press).
Her latest projects are an investigation of the public perception of banks around the Panic of 1819, and an examination of the relationship between banking and slavery in the United States during the nineteenth century.
Dr. Patrick Lewis
Patrick Lewis is Scholar in Residence at the Filson Historical Society and is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Ohio Valley History.
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Patrick Lewis is Scholar in Residence at the Filson Historical Society and is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Ohio Valley History. A Trigg County, Kentucky, native, Lewis graduated from Transylvania University and holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Kentucky. He has worked for the National Park Service and the Kentucky Historical Society, and has won digital history grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Lewis is author of For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War (2015). He tweets about public history at @KyPLewis.
Kevin Outterson, J.D., LL.M.
Professor Outterson teaches health care law at Boston University, where he co-directs the Health Law Program.
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Professor Outterson teaches health care law at Boston University, where he co-directs the Health Law Program. He serves as the Executive Director and Principal Investigator for CARB-X, a $500M international public-private partnership to accelerate global antibacterial innovation. Key partners in CARB-X include the US Government (BARDA & NIAID), the Wellcome Trust, the UK Government (GAMRIF, DHSC), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Professor Outterson’s research work focuses on the law and economics of antimicrobial resistance (available at Google Scholar). He served as a senior author on many key research reports on antibiotic innovation, including Chatham House, ERG, DRIVE-AB, and the Lancet Commission. Professor Outterson was given the 2015 Leadership Award by the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics for his research and advocacy work. He has testified before Congress, Parliamentary working groups, WHO, and several state legislatures. Since August 2016, he leads CARB-X, the world’s largest and most innovative antibiotic accelerator. www.carb-x.org
Professor and N. Neal Pike Scholar in Health and Disability Law,
Boston University
Executive Director & Principal Investigator, CARB-X
Professor Outterson’s research work focuses on the law and economics of antimicrobial resistance (available at Google Scholar). He served as a senior author on many key research reports on antibiotic innovation, including Chatham House, ERG, DRIVE-AB, and the Lancet Commission. Professor Outterson was given the 2015 Leadership Award by the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics for his research and advocacy work. He has testified before Congress, Parliamentary working groups, WHO, and several state legislatures. Since August 2016, he leads CARB-X, the world’s largest and most innovative antibiotic accelerator. www.carb-x.org
Professor and N. Neal Pike Scholar in Health and Disability Law,
Boston University
Executive Director & Principal Investigator, CARB-X
Episode Bibliography
Learn more about slavery and its lasting effects in America by exploring the source materials referenced in The Reckoning. Our bibliography contains many items that are available to read or download for free. If you choose to purchase any of the books through the links provided, as an Amazon Associate, our non-profit organization Reckoning, Inc. earns commissions from qualifying purchases.
Andrews, Susan C., and James P. Fenton. “Archaeology and the Invisible Man: The Role of Slavery in the Production of Wealth and Social Class in the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky, 1820 to 1870.” World Archaeology 33, no. 1 (2001): 115-36. Accessed May 12, 2020. Read Free at JSTOR
Brown, Patricia L. “In a Barn, a Piece of Slavery’s Hidden Past.” The New York Times, May 6, 2003.
Browning, Orville H. (paid link) The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning. Chicago: Blakely Printing Company, 1927. Read Free at Internet Archive
Clark, Thomas D. (paid link) Kentucky: Land of Contrasts. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
Clark, Thomas D. “The Slave trade between Kentucky and the Cotton Kingdom,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 21, issue 3 (Dec., 1934), pp.331-342. Read free at JSTOR. DOI: 10.2307/1897378
Coleman, J. Winston. (paid link) “Lexington’s Slave Dealers and Their Southern Trade.” The Filson Club History Quarterly 12, no. 1 (1938).
Deyle, Steven. (paid link) Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. For an in-depth examination of local sales see chapter five.
Fitzpatrick, Benjamin. “Negroes for Sale: The Slave Trade in Antebellum Kentucky.” PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2010. Read Free at CurateND
Ireland, Robert M. (paid link) The County Courts in Antebellum Kentucky. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015.
Lewis, Patrick. (paid link) For Slavery and Union: Benjamin Buckner and Kentucky Loyalties in the Civil War. University Press of Kentucky, Mar 9, 2015
Murphy, Sharon A. “Banking on Slavery in the Antebellum South”. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Economic History Workshop, May 1, 2017.
Murphy, Sharon A. (paid link) Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Rothman, Joshua D. (paid link) Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.
Rothman, Joshua D. (paid link) Reforming America, 1815-1860 (Norton Documents Reader). New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.
Russell, Thomas D. “Articles Sell Best Singly: The Disruption of Slave Families at Court Sales.” Utah Law Review, Vol. 1996, p. 1161-1209, 1996. Available free at SSRN.com
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. (paid link) Uncle Tom’s Cabin. London: Cassell, 1852. Read for free at GoogleBooks
Woolfolk, George R. “Taxes and Slavery in the Ante Bellum South.” The Journal of Southern History 26, no. 2 (1960): 180-200. Accessed May 12, 2020. doi:10.2307/2955182. Read for free at Jstor
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