You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. If I'm to trace a pair of shoes from the community

in central Massachusetts where they're made all the way to the Louisiana plantation where they're

worn, I can tell a million different stories. And they're not just stories of like this person's

shoes looked like this, but really about, say, a farming family and their

subsistence strategies in Massachusetts as they make decisions about how to allocate the labor

of a daughter or a wife over wintertime to make shoes as opposed to growing onions,

all the way then down to an enslaved man in shoes who is contemplating escape and whose probability and prospects

for fugitivity depend very much on having footwear that can allow him to move through space

and protect his body as he travels through a very inhospitable landscape.

Music landscape.

Hello, and welcome to episode 422 of Ben Franklin's World, the podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past have shaped

the present day world we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Covert.

When we talk about slavery in early America, we often focus on the plantation.

They're large fertile fields, their cash crops, and the people who labored on those fields to produce those cash crops under conditions of enslavement.

But what about the seemingly ordinary objects that made slavery work?

The shoes, the axes, the cloth, and the hose?

What can these everyday objects reveal about the economic and social systems

that sustained slavery in the early United States?

Seth Rockman, a professor of history at Brown

University, and author of Plantation Goods, a material history of American slavery, a book

that was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in History, joins us to rethink how

...