Historians on Edward Baptist

Al Zambone and Bob Elder discuss the book on the podcast Historically Thinking.

Trevor Burnard discusses Baptist’s responses to his critics. Burnard writes that “repeatedly, Baptist puts himself up as the authority on slave testimony; places himself as the judge of what is contained in slave testimony, and suggests that all of his critics are deficient because they don’t take slave testimony as seriously as he does.”

I tried to explain Baptist’s position to someone by pointing out that he seems to believe he speaks for the enslaved the way the Lorax speaks for the trees. The only difference is that the trees did not speak, the enslaved did.