{"product_id":"beyond-the-indigo-fields-women-julia-wolbrook-9798235983366","title":"Beyond the Indigo Fields Women, Slavery, Resistance, and Agricultural Innovation in the Making of Colonial America","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe history books remember the men who signed the documents.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis book is about everyone else.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the rice fields and counting houses of colonial South Carolina, three lives intersected in ways that would shape a colony, transform an economy, and quietly rewrite the boundaries of who mattered in early America. Ann Drayton, a widow who seized control of a plantation empire at a moment when the law said she shouldn't. Eliza Lucas, a teenager who ran three plantations, cultivated a cash crop that would generate millions, and did it all while convincing a patriarchal society she was being a dutiful daughter. And Quash, carpenter, fugitive, freedman, an enslaved man whose hands built the vats that made the indigo industry possible, whose knowledge outperformed every white artisan put against him, and whose extraordinary journey from bondage to freedom illuminates everything the official history of colonial America has spent three centuries trying not to say.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBeyond the Indigo Fields\u003c\/em\u003e is the story of the people who held the colonial world together while being denied credit for it. It is the story of what a woman could accomplish when necessity stripped away the polite fictions about what women were capable of. It is the story of what enslaved people actually knew, about agriculture, about law, about geopolitics, about survival, and how that knowledge shaped the very society that sought to erase it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is, above all, the story of how power really worked in early America: not handed down from above by the men whose portraits hang in museums, but negotiated daily, on plantation grounds and in courtrooms and in the margins of a slave colony's anxious legislation, by women and Black Americans whose contributions have been footnoted, minimized, and quietly forgotten.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUntil now.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawing on letters, legal records, plantation documents, and newspaper archives, \u003cem\u003eBeyond the Indigo Fields\u003c\/em\u003e reconstructs these three lives with the intimacy of biography and the sweep of social history. It asks what the story of colonial America looks like when we follow the indigo dye back to the vat, and the vat back to the man who built it. What it reveals will change the way you understand who built this country, and at what cost.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe fields were blue because of what they grew.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e The colony was rich because of who they owned.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe story was incomplete because of who they forgot.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eNot anymore.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Julia Wolbrook\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9798235983366\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Serena Capuozzo\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 06\/30\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 234\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.61lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.53d","brand":"Julia Wolbrook","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":48871449329919,"sku":"9798235983366","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/beyond-the-indigo-fields-women-julia-wolbrook-9798235983366","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}