Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

By Ira Berlin

Book Overview

In the late 1990s, most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the 19th century, after almost 200 years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. This text traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early-17th century through to 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 the nation.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674810929
• ISBN13: 9780674810921
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 1.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.8" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Important Synthesis of Early Enslavement

Ira Berlin in "Many Thousands Gone" has made a very important contribution to the growing literature attempting to understand both the big picture and the daily details of slavery. As his subtitle suggests, his work focuses on the first two centuries of slavery in North America. Berlin's primary (and well-documented) thesis is that slave culture was not one monolithic culture, but several different cultures depending upon the era and the area of North American enslavement. Additionally, Berlin highlights that slavery was racist and classist, an interpretation which does not minimize the evils of racism, but also exposes the evils of classism. Though in other works by the same author, readers find first-hand accounts of the horrors of slavery in the words of the enslaved, such documentation is less evident in this work. An increase in such documentation would have strengthened the already excellent "Many Thousand Gone." Still, the overall message and "feel" of "Many Thousands Gone" does accurately and powerfully depict the agony and inhumanity of African American slavery. Berlin engages the important issue of the slave's choice of or refusal to choose the master's religion. Including a small sampling of the slave narratives (the majority of which evidence acceptance of Christianity) and the myriad slave conversion accounts, would have provided added depth to this fine book. Converting slaves, by their own accounts, did not see themselves as converting to their masters' religion. Instead, they saw themselves rejecting their masters' hypocritical distortion of Christianity and receiving Christ and Christianity, cleansed of lies and replete with the message of eternal freedom spirituality and internal freedom in Christ. For the broad panorama of early enslavement, look no further than "Many Thousands Gone." Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction , Soul Physicians, and Spiritual Friends.

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

Brought for college class. Arrived in excellent condition. Purchased new book at great price. Better then campus store prices.

Perhaps the finest book on American slavery ever written.

The academic world has been waiting for this book for the last eighteen years. Berlin, already one of the dean's of slavery studies in America, has written a masterful study of the entire evolution of American slavery from it's very beginings to it's terrible highpoint, during the Ante-Bellum period in the South. The Genius of Berlin, however, is to understand this development in a way in which both the location of a slave and the time in which he or she lived affected his or her life. People who have studied slavery for too long have described it as a static experience, one that never elvolved, changed, or got better or worse. With his wonderful book, Berlin has ended all this and brought us into a new era of slavery studies. Many Thousands Gone is a fine book to take us into the next century as we continue to try to understand America.