Close Modal
Pull List 0 Pull List 0
Download high-resolution image

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

Author Daina Ramey Berry
Paperback
$18.95 US
Beacon Press
6"W x 9"H x 0.75"D   | 12 oz | 24 per carton
On sale Dec 26, 2017 | 280 Pages | 9780807067147
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies
See Additional Formats
This “must-read for anyone interested in understanding American history” reframes how we think about slavery, reparations, 19th-century medical education—and the value of life and death (Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton).

“A brilliant resurrection of the forgotten people who gave their lives to build our country.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
 
In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating “ghost values” or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools.

This book is the culmination of more than 10 years of Berry’s exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples’ experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives.

A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, 19th-century medical education, and the value of life and death.
Daina Ramey Berry is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and associate dean of the Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author or co-editor of several previous books, including The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, winner of the 2017 SHEAR Book Award for Early American History. Connect with her at drdainarameyberry.com or @DainaRameyBerry on Twitter. View titles by Daina Ramey Berry
Available for sale exclusive:
•     Afghanistan
•     Aland Islands
•     Albania
•     Algeria
•     Andorra
•     Angola
•     Anguilla
•     Antarctica
•     Antigua/Barbuda
•     Argentina
•     Armenia
•     Aruba
•     Australia
•     Austria
•     Azerbaijan
•     Bahamas
•     Bahrain
•     Bangladesh
•     Barbados
•     Belarus
•     Belgium
•     Belize
•     Benin
•     Bermuda
•     Bhutan
•     Bolivia
•     Bonaire, Saba
•     Bosnia Herzeg.
•     Botswana
•     Bouvet Island
•     Brazil
•     Brit.Ind.Oc.Ter
•     Brit.Virgin Is.
•     Brunei
•     Bulgaria
•     Burkina Faso
•     Burundi
•     Cambodia
•     Cameroon
•     Canada
•     Cape Verde
•     Cayman Islands
•     Centr.Afr.Rep.
•     Chad
•     Chile
•     China
•     Christmas Islnd
•     Cocos Islands
•     Colombia
•     Comoro Is.
•     Congo
•     Cook Islands
•     Costa Rica
•     Croatia
•     Cuba
•     Curacao
•     Cyprus
•     Czech Republic
•     Dem. Rep. Congo
•     Denmark
•     Djibouti
•     Dominica
•     Dominican Rep.
•     Ecuador
•     Egypt
•     El Salvador
•     Equatorial Gui.
•     Eritrea
•     Estonia
•     Ethiopia
•     Falkland Islnds
•     Faroe Islands
•     Fiji
•     Finland
•     France
•     Fren.Polynesia
•     French Guinea
•     Gabon
•     Gambia
•     Georgia
•     Germany
•     Ghana
•     Gibraltar
•     Greece
•     Greenland
•     Grenada
•     Guadeloupe
•     Guam
•     Guatemala
•     Guernsey
•     Guinea Republic
•     Guinea-Bissau
•     Guyana
•     Haiti
•     Heard/McDon.Isl
•     Honduras
•     Hong Kong
•     Hungary
•     Iceland
•     India
•     Indonesia
•     Iran
•     Iraq
•     Ireland
•     Isle of Man
•     Israel
•     Italy
•     Ivory Coast
•     Jamaica
•     Japan
•     Jersey
•     Jordan
•     Kazakhstan
•     Kenya
•     Kiribati
•     Kuwait
•     Kyrgyzstan
•     Laos
•     Latvia
•     Lebanon
•     Lesotho
•     Liberia
•     Libya
•     Liechtenstein
•     Lithuania
•     Luxembourg
•     Macau
•     Macedonia
•     Madagascar
•     Malawi
•     Malaysia
•     Maldives
•     Mali
•     Malta
•     Marshall island
•     Martinique
•     Mauritania
•     Mauritius
•     Mayotte
•     Mexico
•     Micronesia
•     Minor Outl.Ins.
•     Moldavia
•     Monaco
•     Mongolia
•     Montenegro
•     Montserrat
•     Morocco
•     Mozambique
•     Myanmar
•     Namibia
•     Nauru
•     Nepal
•     Netherlands
•     New Caledonia
•     New Zealand
•     Nicaragua
•     Niger
•     Nigeria
•     Niue
•     Norfolk Island
•     North Korea
•     North Mariana
•     Norway
•     Oman
•     Pakistan
•     Palau
•     Palestinian Ter
•     Panama
•     PapuaNewGuinea
•     Paraguay
•     Peru
•     Philippines
•     Pitcairn Islnds
•     Poland
•     Portugal
•     Puerto Rico
•     Qatar
•     Reunion Island
•     Romania
•     Russian Fed.
•     Rwanda
•     S. Sandwich Ins
•     Saint Martin
•     Samoa,American
•     San Marino
•     SaoTome Princip
•     Saudi Arabia
•     Senegal
•     Serbia
•     Seychelles
•     Sierra Leone
•     Singapore
•     Sint Maarten
•     Slovakia
•     Slovenia
•     Solomon Islands
•     Somalia
•     South Africa
•     South Korea
•     South Sudan
•     Spain
•     Sri Lanka
•     St Barthelemy
•     St. Helena
•     St. Lucia
•     St. Vincent
•     St.Chr.,Nevis
•     St.Pier,Miquel.
•     Sth Terr. Franc
•     Sudan
•     Suriname
•     Svalbard
•     Swaziland
•     Sweden
•     Switzerland
•     Syria
•     Tadschikistan
•     Taiwan
•     Tanzania
•     Thailand
•     Timor-Leste
•     Togo
•     Tokelau Islands
•     Tonga
•     Trinidad,Tobago
•     Tunisia
•     Turkey
•     Turkmenistan
•     Turks&Caicos Is
•     Tuvalu
•     US Virgin Is.
•     USA
•     Uganda
•     Ukraine
•     Unit.Arab Emir.
•     United Kingdom
•     Uruguay
•     Uzbekistan
•     Vanuatu
•     Vatican City
•     Venezuela
•     Vietnam
•     Wallis,Futuna
•     West Saharan
•     Western Samoa
•     Yemen
•     Zambia
•     Zimbabwe
Author’s Note

Preface

List of Images

INTRODUCTION
The Value of Life and Death

CHAPTER 1
Preconception: Women and Future Increase

CHAPTER 2
Infancy and Childhood

CHAPTER 3
Adolescence, Young Adulthood, and Soul Values

CHAPTER 4
Midlife and Older Adulthood

CHAPTER 5
Elderly and Superannuated

CHAPTER 6
Postmortem: Death and Ghost Values

EPILOGUE
The Afterlives of Slavery

Acknowledgments

Appendix: A Timeline of Slavery, Medical History, and Black Bodies

Note on Sources: A History of People and Corpses

Notes

Index

About the Author
Winner of the 2018 Hamilton Book Award, University Coop (Austin, TX)
Winner of the 2018 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize (SHEAR)
Winner of the 2018 Phillis Wheatley Literary Award, Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage
Finalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Yale University

“Berry’s groundbreaking work in the historiography of American slavery deserves a wide readership beyond academia.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“In this sharp, affecting study, Berry reminds us of the cold calculus at the intersection of slavery and capitalism...A well-researched, effectively presented piece of scholarship that forthrightly confronts slavery’s brute essence.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“...highly readable and addressing the most heartbreaking and starkly gruesome aspects of slavery.”
—Library Journal

“With The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Berry is now seen as a breakthrough writer who completed the herculean task of filling in the blanks of one of the darkest episodes in American history.”
—Essence Magazine

“Brings to light the gruesome history of the desecration and dissection of black bodies after death, especially by professors of anatomy in American colleges and medical schools.”
—Adam Rothman (professor of history at Georgetown University), American Historical Review

“A brilliant resurrection of the forgotten people who gave their lives to build our country. Rigorously researched and powerfully told, this book tallies the human price paid for the nation we now live in and restores these unrecognized Americans—their hopes, loves, and disregarded dreams—to their rightful place in history. Searing, revelatory, and vital to understanding our nation’s inequities.”
—Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

“Daina Ramey Berry’s harrowing account of how slaveholders turned every aspect of a slave’s life into a commodity to be sold on markets—from the reproductive possibilities of enslaved women to the corpses of deceased slaves—is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding American history, or our contemporary dilemmas. Reading The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will leave you with an overwhelming sense of sadness, but also with great anger that we are still failing to fully overcome this history’s legacy.”
—Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Daina Berry has written the richest account of the many ways in which an enslaved African American’s body was bought and sold throughout her or his lifetime. From the cradle to the grave and beyond, enslavers priced black bodies based on their imagined fitness for labor, sexual exploitation, use as collateral, and even their value after death as dissection cadavers. In horrific detail, Berry shows that there was a price tag placed on every pound of flesh. She also shows the efforts of enslaved people to assert that their lives had values beyond the money that could be rendered from their muscles and extracted from their bones. Out of the certainty that their souls were pearls beyond price, black people fought to make room for their own system of human values.”
—Edward E. Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

About

This “must-read for anyone interested in understanding American history” reframes how we think about slavery, reparations, 19th-century medical education—and the value of life and death (Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton).

“A brilliant resurrection of the forgotten people who gave their lives to build our country.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
 
In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating “ghost values” or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools.

This book is the culmination of more than 10 years of Berry’s exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples’ experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives.

A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, 19th-century medical education, and the value of life and death.

Creators

Daina Ramey Berry is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and associate dean of the Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author or co-editor of several previous books, including The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, winner of the 2017 SHEAR Book Award for Early American History. Connect with her at drdainarameyberry.com or @DainaRameyBerry on Twitter. View titles by Daina Ramey Berry

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

Preface

List of Images

INTRODUCTION
The Value of Life and Death

CHAPTER 1
Preconception: Women and Future Increase

CHAPTER 2
Infancy and Childhood

CHAPTER 3
Adolescence, Young Adulthood, and Soul Values

CHAPTER 4
Midlife and Older Adulthood

CHAPTER 5
Elderly and Superannuated

CHAPTER 6
Postmortem: Death and Ghost Values

EPILOGUE
The Afterlives of Slavery

Acknowledgments

Appendix: A Timeline of Slavery, Medical History, and Black Bodies

Note on Sources: A History of People and Corpses

Notes

Index

About the Author

Praise

Winner of the 2018 Hamilton Book Award, University Coop (Austin, TX)
Winner of the 2018 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize (SHEAR)
Winner of the 2018 Phillis Wheatley Literary Award, Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage
Finalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Yale University

“Berry’s groundbreaking work in the historiography of American slavery deserves a wide readership beyond academia.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“In this sharp, affecting study, Berry reminds us of the cold calculus at the intersection of slavery and capitalism...A well-researched, effectively presented piece of scholarship that forthrightly confronts slavery’s brute essence.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“...highly readable and addressing the most heartbreaking and starkly gruesome aspects of slavery.”
—Library Journal

“With The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Berry is now seen as a breakthrough writer who completed the herculean task of filling in the blanks of one of the darkest episodes in American history.”
—Essence Magazine

“Brings to light the gruesome history of the desecration and dissection of black bodies after death, especially by professors of anatomy in American colleges and medical schools.”
—Adam Rothman (professor of history at Georgetown University), American Historical Review

“A brilliant resurrection of the forgotten people who gave their lives to build our country. Rigorously researched and powerfully told, this book tallies the human price paid for the nation we now live in and restores these unrecognized Americans—their hopes, loves, and disregarded dreams—to their rightful place in history. Searing, revelatory, and vital to understanding our nation’s inequities.”
—Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

“Daina Ramey Berry’s harrowing account of how slaveholders turned every aspect of a slave’s life into a commodity to be sold on markets—from the reproductive possibilities of enslaved women to the corpses of deceased slaves—is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding American history, or our contemporary dilemmas. Reading The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will leave you with an overwhelming sense of sadness, but also with great anger that we are still failing to fully overcome this history’s legacy.”
—Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Daina Berry has written the richest account of the many ways in which an enslaved African American’s body was bought and sold throughout her or his lifetime. From the cradle to the grave and beyond, enslavers priced black bodies based on their imagined fitness for labor, sexual exploitation, use as collateral, and even their value after death as dissection cadavers. In horrific detail, Berry shows that there was a price tag placed on every pound of flesh. She also shows the efforts of enslaved people to assert that their lives had values beyond the money that could be rendered from their muscles and extracted from their bones. Out of the certainty that their souls were pearls beyond price, black people fought to make room for their own system of human values.”
—Edward E. Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Additional formats

Other Books by this Author

ABOUT PRH COMICS RETAIL

RETAILER CUSTOMER SERVICE CONTACTS

Back to Top
 Penguin Random House Comics Retail
0
    • 0
    Pull List (0)