Stan’s guest this week is UGA professor Daniel Rood, talking about his new book, In the Shadow of the Great House: A History of the Plantation in America (W.W. Norton, 2026), a new history of American slavery and American capitalism. The plantation traces its roots to the Portuguese conquest of an island in the Atlantic in the 1500s and reached its most powerful manifestation in the United States. But Rood argues in this provocative new history that plantations did not end with the Civil War but metastasized across space and time and can still be found today, touching nearly every aspect of our lives.
