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More About This Textbook
Overview
Ira Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its fiery demise nearly three hundred years later.
Most Americans, black and white, have a singular vision of slavery, one fixed in the mid-nineteenth century when most American slaves grew cotton, resided in the deep South, and subscribed to Christianity. Here, however, Berlin offers a dynamic vision, a major reinterpretation in which slaves and their owners continually renegotiated the terms of captivity. Slavery was thus made and remade by successive generations of Africans and African Americans who lived through settlement and adaptation, plantation life, economic transformations, revolution, forced migration, war, and ultimately, emancipation.
Berlin's understanding of the processes that continually transformed the lives of slaves makes Generations of Captivity essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of antebellum America. Connecting the "Charter Generation" to the development of Atlantic society in the seventeenth century, the "Plantation Generation" to the reconstruction of colonial society in the eighteenth century, the "Revolutionary Generation" to the Age of Revolutions, and the "Migration Generation" to American expansionism in the nineteenth century, Berlin integrates the history of slavery into the larger story of American life. He demonstrates how enslaved black people, by adapting to changing circumstances, prepared for the moment when they could seize liberty and declare themselves the "Freedom Generation."
This epic story, told by a master historian, provides a rich understanding of the experience of African-American slaves, an experience that continues to mobilize American thought and passions today.
Editorial Reviews
The Los Angeles Times
Generations of Captivity is a work of great authority, covering the whole history of African American slaves from Colonial origins to 1865. Ira Berlin is one of the most accomplished historians of American slavery. … The framing of the story in this book around generations defined by decisive turning points helps lend it drama and urgency, without offering the false consolation of a happy ending. — Robin BlackburnThe New York Times
Ira Berlin has written what will undoubtedly become one of the indispensable books on North American slavery. Generations of Captivity traces the history of this dismal institution from its 17th-century origins to its 19th-century destruction in the maelstrom of civil war. He comes closer than any other contemporary historian to giving us an opportunity -- in a single, readable volume -- to come to grips with a subject very few of us wish to think about but which all of us surely need to consider: how millions of white Americans over the course of three centuries came to hold millions of black Americans in chattel bondage while managing to lose nary a moment's sleep over their complicity in this monstrous enterprise. — Charles B. DewThe Washington Post
Berlin considers the whole sweep of America's "peculiar institution," from its origins in the 17th century to its destruction in 1865, in the form of the 13th Amendment. Countering the position of those who would portray slavery as a monolithic, oppressive institution, Berlin argues that whites and blacks, masters and slaves, engaged in continuous, fierce "negotiations" about work demands, and about the nature of blacks' family and community lives. — Jacqueline JonesPublishers Weekly
Eminent historian Berlin revisits and extends by a century the territory of his honored and groundbreaking Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (1998), incorporating the "vast outpouring of new research in this field" in the brief period since its publication and mirroring that book's structure. In 150 or so pages here, Berlin recapitulates the argument of his earlier, prize-winning work, delineating "the making and remaking of slavery" as a matter of "Generations": the "Charter Generations," who managed "to integrate themselves into mainline society during the first century of settlement, despite their status as slaves and the contempt of the colony's rulers"; the "Plantation Generations," living in a world where "blackness and whiteness took on new meaning," who managed "to forge new communities as `Africans,' an identity no one had previously considered or even knew existed"; and the "Revolutionary Generations," beneficiaries, victims, and participants in both the "revolutionary ideology [and] evangelical upsurge" of the period. Berlin, president of the Organization of American Historians and an editor of the Remembering Slavery project, is attentive to place as well as time, and focuses first on New Netherland, the Chesapeake, and the North, followed by variants in Florida, the Lower Mississippi Valley and Low Country South Carolina. New to this book are "the Migration Generations," who suffered a Second Middle Passage with the accelerated transcontinental "transfer" of slaves between 1810 and 1861. An epilogue introduces the "Freedom Generations," reaching into the 1860s. While preserving the terrible complexity and diversity of North American slavery, Berlin offers a compact scholarly account of the transformation of a society with slaves into a slave society. He reveals without condescension or simplification the inspiring social structures that arose from a horrific history. While it may not get the attention of Many Thousands, this book follows up with grace and determination. (Mar. 15) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.KLIATT
Renowned historian and author of Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin here expands his previous work on African American slavery in the US to complete the history of slavery from the early 17th century to the 1860s. Distinguishing carefully between the slaves of the earlier decades who lived in a "society with slaves" and those of the later plantation South who lived in a "slave society," Berlin also takes pains to describe the lives of the slaves as they differed from one geographical region to another. Stressing that the greatest changes in slave life in the US actually occurred in the 50 years preceding the Civil War, Berlin emphasizes the diversity found in the slave-holding South. He claims furthermore that the North could be considered a society with slaves well into the second half of the 19th century. His careful research is backed by extensive annotation and slave population tables. This award-winning book is highly recommended. KLIATT Codes: SA*—Exceptional book, recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Harvard Univ. Press, 374p. illus. notes. index., Ages 15 to adult.—Patricia Moore
Library Journal
Over the past 20 years, Berlin's work has redefined how scholars approach the study of slavery and freedom in America. His scholarship on slavery and race (especially his award-winning Many Thousands Gone) and his complete command of the enormous literature on slavery now come together to inform this compelling history. Here Berlin carefully delineates the ways slavery varied according to time and place and compares slavery in the Americas, mapping the migrations of peoples from Africa to America and then across the South in its various incarnations, discovering within slave life the roots of African American religions, family, folkways, foodways, crafts, and more. His book reminds us that the generations after emancipation still resonated with the culture of those once held in captivity. Essential.-Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.Product Details
Meet the Author
Ira Berlin is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.
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