Seth Rockman’s Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery Wins Bard Graduate Center’s Horowitz Book Prize
Bard Graduate Center is pleased to announce that the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize for the best book on the decorative arts, design history, or material culture of the Americas published in 2024 has been awarded to Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery by Seth Rockman, published by University of Chicago Press. The prize rewards scholarly excellence and commitment to cross-disciplinary conversation in books about decorative arts, design history, or material culture of the Americas.
Plantation Goods is an eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor. Using plantation goods— the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation.
In making the award, the members of the selection committee for the Horowitz Book Prize wrote, “Plantation Goods is creatively organized around objects. The book’s three main sections, Production, Distribution, and Consumption, follow the biographies of commodities enmeshed in the American system of enslavement, from the factories of the North to the plantations of the South. Each section of this wide-ranging material history also contains an interlude highlighting one object produced for use on plantations: a shoe, a textile, and a whip. In focusing on these things—their itineraries, materiality, and ‘social lives’—Rockman generates a new and important perspective on the well-studied topic of slavery. He reveals clear evidence of just how completely the North’s economy was integrated within the system of slavery and how plantation goods shaped ideas about race both in the South and the North…Plantation Goods is the work of a thoughtful and talented scholar who cares deeply about justice. It transports readers to the past to better understand historical injustices and inspires contemplation of their legacies in the present.”
Seth Rockman is the George L. Littlefield Professor of American History at Brown University. He is the author of Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore and coeditor of Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Rockman serves on the faculty advisory board of Brown University’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island. In addition to being named the winner of the Horowitz Book Prize, Plantation Goods was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History and the recipient of the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award and the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Family Prize.
