Books about American history tend to be either triumphal or highly critical. Gene Dattel’s study of the racial legacy of cotton, America’s leading export up to World War II, is neither. Above all, it is informed, honest, and balanced. Dattel explains insightfully just how slavery and racial discrimination came to plague our nation’s ideals and the promise of American life. Mostly it was a by-product–north and south, east and west–of trying to earn a buck, of pursuing the Almighty Dollar. His book is a gem–one of the finest works on the American national experience to appear in many years.