In Never Together, Temin, the distinguished economic historian, provides a historical narrative of U.S. economic development that emphasizes the origins and persistence of the racial divide in American economic and social life. Often reading like a textbook in its first six substantive chapters, the book veers into a vigorous condemnation of the Trump presidency at its close.
The book is arranged chronologically, starting in Chapter 1 with an account of slavery through the Civil War. Chapter 2 covers Reconstruction as well as the contemporaneous postbellum westward expansion and development of the railroads and, in Chapter 3, the Gilded Age and the rise of Jim Crow in the South. Temin appears to embrace the view that slavery was central not only to the economy of the South but to economic growth and prosperity in the industrializing North as well, although he does not cite, let alone engage, the evidence for...