Quotes from Bernard Bailyn

it is a fact that eleven million Africans were forcibly carried abroad, more than nine million of them to the Americas.

at the height of the British slave trade, in the 1790s, one large slave vessel left England for Africa every other day.

slave rebellions occurred on approximately 10 percent of all slave ships

10 percent of the slaves on such voyages were killed in the insurrections (which totals one hundred thousand deaths, 1500–1867)

They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body will be argued into slavery.6

If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body will be argued into slavery.

a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.… The state is considered the sole source of the 'right' to use violence.

Independence was enriching, but most often it meant loss, isolation, and cultural deprivation

we don't live in Plato's Commonwealth, and when we can't have perfection we ought to comply with the measure that is least remote from it.

The number of slave voyages included in the database has now risen to thirty-five thousand, accounting for the forced migration of more than twelve million Africans between 1514 and 1866, a million more than were estimated at the time of the conference in 1998.

we try to describe the path from then to now, and in doing so select for our accounts the elements in a once indeterminate situation that appear to have led to the future outcome.

Fliess concluded from his studies that the physiological seat of sexuality lay in the nose, and that there was a twenty-three-day cycle in male sexuality that bore some relation to astronomical movements.

historians should be doing, according to some, is condemning them and focusing on the immorality of slavery and the Founders' moral blinders.

he sincerely loathed slavery; he called it "an abominable crime" and a blot on civilization.

why did he not free his slaves?