Skip content
Get a free audiobook AND support bookstores Make the switch
Black Hands, White House by Renee K. Harrison
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Libro.fm app

Get a free audiobook when you make the switch!

When you start a new membership in support of African American Literature Book Club with the promo code SWITCH, you’ll get a bonus audiobook credit at sign-up.

Make the switch

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and African American Literature Book Club is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting

Black Hands, White House

Slave Labor and the Making of America

$26.24

Get for $14.99 with membership
Length 18 hours 42 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

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 fathers, other early European immigrants, and their descendants; and bolstered the wealth of present-day companies founded during the American slave era. Critical to this study are also examples of enslaved laborers' role in building Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and George Washington's Mount Vernon. Subsequently, their labor also constructed the nation's capital city, Federal City (later renamed Washington DC), its seats of governance—the White House and US Capitol—and other federal sites and memorials.

Given the enslaved community's contribution to the US, this work questions the absence of memorials on the National Mall that honor enslaved, Black-bodied people. Harrison argues that such monuments are necessary to redress the nation's historical disregard of Black people and America's role in their forced migration, violent subjugation, and free labor.

Renee K. Harrison is an associate professor of African American and US religious history at Howard University. She joined the School of Divinity faculty in the fall of 2010. She is the author of Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America and coauthor, with Jennie Knight, of Engaged Teaching in Theology and Religion.

Libro.fm app

Get a free audiobook when you make the switch!

When you start a new membership in support of African American Literature Book Club with the promo code SWITCH, you’ll get a bonus audiobook credit at sign-up.

Make the switch

Gift audiobook credit bundles

You pick the number of credits, your recipient picks the audiobooks, and African American Literature Book Club is supported by your purchase.

Start gifting
book-open-1

Want the printed book?

Get the print edition from African American Literature Book Club.

Get the print edition

Powered by Bookstore Link

Get a free audiobook AND support bookstores Make the switch

African American Literature Book Club is proud to partner with Libro.fm to give you a great audiobook experience.