This is Jackinman Radio. I'm Micah Utrich, associate editor at Jackopin.

American slaveholders wielded enormous power before the Civil War ended slavery

and oversaw an incredibly brutal economic system that generated enormous

wealth for a tiny elite while denying enslaved Africans the most basic rights.

But they also presided over American foreign policy, overseeing U.S. territorial and economic expansion.

The slaveholders weren't actually separatists.

They were nationalists.

They didn't just want an independent slaveholding south. They wanted to spread their

empire of slavery to the entire United States and beyond. Historian Matt Karp tells the story

in this vast southern empire, slaveholders at the helm of American foreign policy.

In November 2016, Karp spoke at the New School in New York City with historian Eric Foner,

Duet Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, and author of an insane number of

insanely good books about the Civil War in American history, including Reconstruction

and the fiery trial. Matt Karp is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University and he's also a contributing editor at Jacobin.

Anyway, Matt Karp's book, The Vast, this vast Southern Empire is is I do honestly recommend it. It is very well written.

Even if you're not a scholar of American history you'll find it interesting and

engaging and lively. It's very

deeply researched. It's cleverly ironic at certain points and we may get into this and

it's quite original actually in its in its argument and that's not

easy to do for a subject that has produced thousands upon thousands of books the

Antebellum South the coming of the Civil War, the

role of slavery in American history.

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