This book is not a micro-history of the post-Reconstruction South and Jim Crow Era in the leadup to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, but it does end up covering a lot of that territory well. The book instead focuses on the various forms of re-enslavement that various states saw in the 1880s-1910s or so, heavily focused on the debt peonage, where someone was imprisoned and enthralled to a specific person in order to work off a debt. This system, and it […]