The expansion of slavery in the decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States, which seized control of the world market for cotton and became a wealthy nation with global influence. Edward Baptist, a professor of history at Cornell University, will present “Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” on October 4 at 7:30 p.m. in Higgins Hall, room 300. Baptist is the author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism and Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War. Martin Summers, an associate professor of history and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College, will offer a response. Baptist is currently leading a project called Freedom on the Move, a collaborative effort in digital history that is building a crowd-sourced database of all fugitive slave advertisements, which recently won an NEH Digital Projects Start-Up Grant. Sponsors: Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, with the Institute for the Liberal Arts and the African and African Diaspora Studies Program.