Black Hands, White House documents and appraises the role enslaved women and men played in building the US, both its physical and its fiscal infrastructure. The book highlights the material commodities produced by enslaved communities during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. These commodities--namely tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton, among others--enriched European and US economies; contributed to the material and monetary wealth of the nation's founding...

"American lucifers tracks how struggles to produce light transformed American history, beginning with the rise of the American whale fishery in the 1750s and culminating in the emergence, around the Civil War, of the petroleum industry and its primary product, kerosene. Between this shift from oil harvested from whales to oil extracted from rocks, American light was substantially derived from a substance called camphene, a highly explosive liquid...

"BLOOD AND EARTH is a gripping account of the deadly link between slavery and environmental destruction. Kevin Bales is a social scientist, human rights activist, and journalist -- and he's also one of the world's leading experts on modern slavery. In his work he began to notice the connection between environmental decline and slavery: the two almost always went hand-in-hand, whether in the hellish gold mines of Ghana or the miraculously beautiful...