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Books
by Ira Berlin
Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
/
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of
Slavery in Mainland North America /
Slaves without Masters
/
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
Table of Contents
Source:
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of
Slavery in Mainland North America (cover) |
