Was at the bookstore today, and found a very cheap remainder copy of a book I've never even heard of: American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, by Edmund S. Morgan. It won the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman prize for historic writing when it was published in 1975.
It's basically a history of how slavery came to be in America, and how it came to an end. I like it because it starts with Francis Drake and the English attitude toward Spanish treatment of the natives in America; they considered themselves liberators, while at the same time giving much the same treatment to the Irish. What's fun for me is that its early chapters read almost like a sequel to Morison's European Discovery of America, which I've just finished.
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“Never do anything you can't take back.”
—Rocky Russo
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