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Books
by Ira Berlin
Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
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Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of
Slavery in Mainland North America /
Slaves without Masters
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Free at Last
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Many
Thousands Gone
The First Two
Centuries of Slavery in North America
By Ira Berlin
Recipient of the 1999 Bancroft Prize from
Columbia University
1999 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention,
sponsored by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry
and Human Rights in North America
Winner of the 1999 Elliott Rudwick Prize of the Organization
of American Historians
Winner of the 1999 Frederick Douglass Prize for the Best Book
on Slavery Sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale
University
Winner, Association of American Publishers 1998
Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Award in the Category
of History
Finalist, 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for
Nonfiction
Co-winner of the Southern Historical Association's Frank L.
and Harriet C. Owsley Award for 1999
Today
most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton,
the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred
years of African-American life in mainland North America, few
slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced
Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of
black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth
century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira
Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American
life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American
working class and into the tapestry of our nation.
Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as
skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier,
generation after generation of African Americans struggled to
create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own
making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the
Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi
Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms
that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We
witness the transformation that occurred as the first
generations of creole slaves--who worked alongside their owners,
free blacks, and indentured whites--gave way to the plantation
generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of
their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation
sustained African traditions on American soil.
As the nature of the slaves' labor changed with place and
time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and
between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid
interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery
and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined,
as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence
and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its
birth.
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Reviews Berlin, who has
already contributed significantly to the literature, here brings
together in a magisterial synthesis much of what has now been
learned about slave life during its first two centuries within
the present United States. --Edmund
S. Morgan, New York Review of Books In
[Many Thousands Gone], Berlin emphasizes that slavery,
too often treated by historians as a static institution, was in
fact constantly changing. The range of subjects is
impressive--from work patterns to family life, naming practices,
religions, race relations and modes of resistance. But by
organizing his account along the axes of space and time, berlin
gives coherence to what would otherwise have been an account
overwhelming by its detail and complexity. In this masterly
work, Ira Berlin has demonstrated that earlier North American
slavery had many different forms and meanings that varied over
time and from place to place. Slavery and race did not have a
fixed character that endured for centuries but were constantly
being constructed or reconstructed in response to changing
historical circumstances. many Thousands Gone illuminates the
first 200 years of African-American history more effectively
than any previous study. --George
Frederickson, New York Times Book Review
Many Thousands
Gone is likely to remain for years to come the standard
account of the first two centuries of slavery in the area that
became the United States.
--Eric Foner, London
Review of Books
Many Thousands
Gone will challenge just about everything you thought you knew
about slavery, especially its dawning. . . . Through this honest
and responsible work, perhaps we can begin decoding our
Pavlovian responses to the buried racial and experiential
triggers we dare not analyze.
--Debra Dickerson, Village
Voice This
meticulous schoarly study demonstrates how and why slavery took
different forms at different times in different colonies and
states, and describes the kinds of autonomy that slaves were
able to wrest from their master under each variant of the
system. Berlin also stresses slaves' skills and acumen, not to
palliate the evil of slavery but to show slaves as something
other than victims--as competent, often exceptionally able, men
and women. --New Yorker The
result is the best general history we now have of the 'peculiar
institution' during its first 200 years. . . . Many thousands
Gone is a remarkable book, one that beautifully integrates two
centuries of history over a wide geographical area. it is a
benchmark study from which students will learn and with which
scholars will grapple for many years to come. --Peter
Kolchin, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Source:
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of
Slavery in Mainland North America (cover)
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Ira Berlin
Distinguished University Professor
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, 1970
US History, African-American History, Slavery
ib3@umail.umd.edu |
Ira Berlin has written broadly on the
history of slavery and emancipation in the United States and the
larger Atlantic world. His first book,
Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1975) won
the Best First Book Prize awarded by the National Historical
Society. Berlin is the founder of the Freedmen and Southern
Society Project, which he directed until 1991. The project's
multi-volume
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation
(1982, 1985, 1990, 1993) has twice been awarded the Thomas
Jefferson Prize of the Society for History in the Federal
Government as well as the J. Franklin Jameson Prize of the
American Historical Association for outstanding editorial
achievement, and the Abraham Lincoln Prize for excellence in
Civil-War studies.
In 1999, his study of African-American life between 1619 and
1819 entitled
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of
Slavery in Mainland North America was published by Harvard
University Press was awarded the Bancroft Prize for the best
book in American history by Columbia University; Frederick
Douglass Prize by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute; Owsley Prize by
the Southern Historical Association, and the Rudwick Prize by
the Organization of American Historians. That same year, the
Humanities Council of Washington named Ira Berlin Outstanding
Public Humanities Scholar of the Year. He is currently president
of the Organization of American Historians.
Professor Berlin has published a monograph, an edition of his
own essays, several editions of articles, and three co-edited
volumes of documents in the Freedman and Southern Society
Project. His monograph,
Slaves without Masters, won the
Best First Book Prize of the National Historical Society. The
Wartime Genesis of Slavery and The Destruction of Slavery
both won the Founders Award of the Valentine Museum in
Richmond and the Jefferson Prize of the Society for History in
the Federal Government. The Black Military Experience won
the J. Franklin Jameson Prize of the American Historical
Association.
Free at Last
won the prestigious Lincoln
Prize. Professor Berlin has also written numerous articles and
chapters in scholarly works. He sits on a number of editorial
boards, has consulted for programs like Ken Burns' Civil War,
and has held office in national historical organizations. He has
held an NEH Junior Fellowship, has been a Fulbright Senior
Scholar in France, and lectured as a Ford Foundation Fellow. He
has also served as Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Acting Dean
of the College of Arts and Humanities.
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The Great Divergence
America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can
Do about It
By Timothy
Noah
For the past three decades, America has steadily
become a nation of haves and have-nots. Our incomes
are increasingly drastically unequal: the top 1% of
Americans collect almost 20% of the nation’s
income—more than double their share in 1973. We have
less equality of income than Venezuela, Kenya, or
Yemen. What economics Nobelist Paul Krugman terms
"the Great Divergence" has until now been treated as
little more than a talking point, a club to be
wielded in ideological battles. But it may be the
most important change in this country during our
lifetimes—a sharp, fundamental shift in the
character of American society, and not at all for
the better. The income gap has been blamed on
everything from computers to immigration, but its
causes and consequences call for a patient,
non-partisan exploration.
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The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story
of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government
By Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer
American democracy is informed by the 18th century’s most cutting edge thinking on society, economics, and government. We’ve learned some things in the intervening 230 years about self interest, social behaviors, and how the world works. Now, authors Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer argue that some fundamental assumptions about citizenship, society, economics, and government need updating. For many years the dominant metaphor for understanding markets and government has been the machine. Liu and Hanauer view democracy not as a machine, but as a garden. A successful garden functions according to the inexorable tendencies of nature, but it also requires goals, regular tending, and an understanding of connected ecosystems. The latest ideas from science, social science, and economics—the cutting-edge ideas of today—generate these simple but revolutionary ideas: (The economy is not an efficient machine. It’s an effective garden that need tending. Freedom is responsibility. Government should be about the big what and the little how. True self interest is mutual interest. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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