Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America 1st Paperback Edition Edition

The American Constitution chose slavery...and the nation justified the choice by formulating an ideology that made blacks into something less than human beings. The result, as historian Ira Berlin argues in a new book on slavery, Many Thousands Gone, is that African slavery became "no longer just one of many forms of subordination--a common enough circumstance in a world ruled by hierarchies--but the foundation on which the social order rested." (Ellis Cose Newsweek)

Ira Berlin's magisterial [book] is a story of slavery in evolutionary perspective...As a comprehensive study of early North American slavery the work is unexcelled and will be a boon to students and scholars alike. (Daniel C. Littlefield Slavery and Abolition)

In [Many Thousands Gone], Berlin emphasises 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 organising 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...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)

Berlin's study is the best account we have of the beginnings of servitude in America. It is also a reminder of slavery's adaptability. The notion that it was necessarily tied to the production of export staples is false. (Howard Temperley Times Literary Supplement)

Occasionally we are rewarded with a brave soul willing to impose shape and direction on what has become, for many, a prodigiously confusing historiography. Ira Berlin, like the very best historians who have tackled the problem, brings to the task a formidable record as a researcher and writer in more specialised areas of slave and post-slave studies. The result of Berlin's labours is a vital book, not simply in making sense of historical complexity, but in advancing a new and distinctive argument about the shaping of North America...[Many Thousands Gone has] a sophisticated argument that imposes shape on historical diversity without in the least riding roughshod over the specific local and regional differences that fragment the American slave experience. This is a deceptive book, for it is not simply a general account of slavery in North America. It is a subtle--and beautifully written--argument about the phases of slave history and of that sharp differentiation across time and place that makes slavery so hard to contain within a more generalised format...What emerges is the most original and most persuasive overall study of North American slavery for a very long time...[Many Thousands Gone] is moreover a book with powerful implications for anyone interested in the wider history of America. It is, quite simply, a book of major importance for all historians of North America. (James Walvin Times Higher Education Supplement)

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)

Ira Berlin provides a sweeping survey of slavery and black life in North America...from the early 17th into the early 19th centuries. 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)

Many Thousands Gone is an imaginatively conceived, brilliantly executed academic history of the experience of African-Americans, from their arrival in Jamestown in 1619, through the early decades of the nineteenth century. With clarity and sympathetic attention, Berlin depicts how, with regional and historical variations, blacks in North America employed a variety of stratagems to confront modify, ameliorate, and even surmount their degraded condition as slaves...Berlin's knowledge of slave life in America is little short of encyclopedic. On virtually every page he illuminates how and to what extent African-Americans in different times and places strove "to negotiate" the terms of their servitude with their masters...This book seems destined to define the terms of discussion for many years to come. (Haim Chertok Jerusalem Post)

When Americans think about slavery--and try to work through its legacy--they're operating from a misleadingly narrow image: the cotton plantations of the deep South. So says Berlin, who chronicles the slave experience in the 200 years--1619 to 1819--that preceded the antebellum period. It's a horrific picture, but a complex one too, including the dramatically different lives of the first Creole slaves, the long northern enthusiasm for slavery, and ever-present patterns of resistance and renegotiation. (Globe and Mail)

In Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin tells the complex and neglected story of American slavery from 1619 through about 1810. It is a story most Americans do not know...Berlin has written a sweeping history that builds upon the pioneering work of John Hope Franklin, John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman and Edmund Morgan, and shines as both a comprehensive and astute synthesis of current scholarship and as an original contribution to the field. (James L. Swanson Chicago Tribune)

Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the American Revolution. Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or as soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of black slaves 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 low country to the Mississippi Valley, Berlin reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton wa king.