This week's guest on REPORT FROM SANTA FE is GREG GRANDIN, author of a number of prize-winning books, including Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City.  A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Fordlandia was picked by the New York Times, New Yorker, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and NPR for their “best of” lists, and Amazon.com named it the best history book of 2009.

Toni Morrison called Grandin’s new work, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, “compelling, brilliant and necessary.” Released in early 2014, the book narrates the history of a slave-ship revolt that inspired Herman Melville’s other masterpiece, Benito Cereno. Philip Gourevitch describes it as a “rare book in which the drama of the action and the drama of ideas are equally measured, a work of history and of literary reflection that is as urgent as it is timely.”

In a recent article in Salon, Grandin hypothesizes that “the modern world in a way owes its very existence to slavery,” detailing the contributions in medicine, economics, and intellectual property generated by slavery. Grandin explores the idea of reparation - one account suggests that the amount of hours of forced labor between 1619 and 1865, when slavery ended in America supposedly, was $222 trillion dollars. That number is just based on back wages and doesn’t calculate the value of the intellectual property generated. This is becoming one of the most controversial issues of our time, and the argument is furthered in Ta-Nehisi Coates' “The Case for Reparations” recent article, featured on PBS' Bill Moyers and HBO's Real Time and also in Salon.

A professor of history at NYU and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Grandin writes on US foreign policy, Latin America, genocide, and human rights.  He has published in The New York Times, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Times, and The American Historical Review.  He has been a frequent guest on Democracy Now! and has appeared on The Charlie Rose Show. 

Grandin also served as a consultant to the United Nations truth commission on Guatemala and has been the recipient of a number of prestigious fellowships, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.  

QUOTES:

“Empire” is scholarship at its best. Grandin's deft penetration into the marrow of the slave industry is compelling, brilliant & necessary.” -- Toni Morrison

“Grandin tells a gripping story of high hopes and deep failure, a saga that in some ways is a morality tale for the American century.”-- Boston Globe, about Grandin's “Fordlandia:”