Nicholas Guyatt

The Most Rancorous Line

How did the Mason–Dixon Line—meant to resolve a long-standing colonial border dispute—come to represent the US’s foundational divide between slavery and freedom?

Blues, Grays & Greenbacks

Two new books argue that the innovations the Lincoln administration used to finance the Civil War transformed the nation from a modest and decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Partners in Brutality

New books investigate the brutality of the internal slave trade by focusing on a single firm, Franklin and Armfield, and examine the role of white women in enslaving Black people.

‘No Property in Man’: An Exchange

How Proslavery Was the Constitution?

Sean Wilentz’s ‘No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding’