Most Popular Books by Ira Berlin

A leading historian of southern and African-American life traces the evolution of black society in America from its creation in the early 17th century through the American Revolution. Berlin reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king.

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.

A vivid and moving history of the quarter of a million free blacks who lived in the South before the Civil War. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Perhaps no event in American history arouses more impassioned debate than the abolition of slavery. Answers to basic questions about who ended slavery, how, and why remain fiercely contested more than a century and a half after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In The Long Emancipation, Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slavery’s demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long process—a shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women. “Ira Berlin ranks as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States... The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists. And like the participants in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United States—especially the history of how slavery ended—is never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change.” —Edward E. Baptist, New York Times Book Review

Essays address the issue of freedom as it applies to slaves in American history, discussing how African Americans resisted slavery and what their response was to freedom during and after the Civil War.

Slaves achieved a degree of economic independence, producing food, tending cash crops, raising livestock, manufacturing furnished goods, marketing their own products, consuming and saving the proceeds and bequeathing property to their descendants. The editors of this volume contend that the legacy of slavery cannot be understood without a full appreciation of the slaves'' economy.

A leading historian offers a sweeping new account of the African American experience over four centuries Four great migrations defined the history of black people in America: the violent removal of Africans to the east coast of North America known as the Middle Passage; the relocation of one million slaves to the interior of the antebellum South; the movement of more than six million blacks to the industrial cities of the north and west a century later; and since the late 1960s, the arrival of black immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, and Europe. These epic migrau00adtions have made and remade African American life. Ira Berlin''s magisterial new account of these passages evokes both the terrible price and the moving triumphs of a people forcibly and then willingly migrating to America. In effect, Berlin rewrites the master narrative of African America, challenging the traditional presentation of a linear path of progress. He finds instead a dynamic of change in which eras of deep rootedness alternate with eras of massive moveu00adment, tradition giving way to innovation. The culture of black America is constantly evolving, affected by (and affecting) places as far away from one another as Biloxi, Chicago, Kingston, and Lagos. Certain to garu00adner widespread media attention, The Making of African America is a bold new account of a long and crucial chapter of American history.

Three essays present an introduction and history of the emancipation of the slaves during the Civil War.

Em GERAÇÕES DE CATIVEIRO, o conceituado historiador Ira Berlin analisa a história da escravidão nos Estados Unidos, desde o início do século XVII até sua abolição, 300 anos depois. Berlin oferece, sem condescendência ou falso moralismo, uma nova versão, uma reinterpretação dinâmica, onde escravos e senhores renegociavam, continuamente, os termos do cativeiro. A escravidão era reinventada por gerações sucessivas de africanos e afro-americanos. Cativos que atravessaram transformações econômicas, revolução, migração forçada, guerra e, por último, a emancipação. Aborda a relação deste fenômeno com a economia e a sociedade e a cultura sulista.

Solomon Northup was born a free black man. He was kidnapped, tortured, and sold into slavery. For 12 years, he was kept in bondage as a slave in Louisiana--Twelve Years a Slave is his moving and raw account of survival and life as a slave.This edition includes the full book as well as a comprehensive companion with historical notes, character overview, themes overview, and chapter summaries.

Union occupation of parts of the Confederacy during the Civil War forced federal officials to confront questions about the social order that would replace slavery. This volume of Freedom presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in the large plantation areas of the Union-occupied Lower South. The documents illustrate the experiences of former slaves as military laborers, as residents of federally sponsored "contraband camps," as wage laborers on plantations and in towns, and in some instances, as independent farmers and self-employed workers. Together with the editors'' interpretative essays, these documents portray the different understandings of freedom advanced by the many participants in the wartime evolution of free labor--former slaves and free blacks; former slaveholders; Union military officers and officials in Washington; and Northern planters, ministers and teachers. The war sealed the fate of slavery only to open a contest over the meaning of freedom. This volume documents an important chapter of that contest. Ira Berlin is the Director of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, University of Maryland.

As slavery collapsed during the American Civil War, former slaves struggled to secure their liberty, reconstitute their families, and create the institutions befitting a free people. This volume of Freedom presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in different settings in the Upper South. At first, most federal officials hoped to mobilize former slaves without either transforming the conflict into a war of liberation or assuming responsibility for the young, the old, or others not suitable for military employment. But as the Union army came to depend on black workers and as the number of destitute freedpeople mounted, authorities at all levels grappled with intertwined questions of freedom, labor and welfare. Meanwhile, the former slaves pursued their own objectives, working within the constraints imposed by the war and Union occupation to fashion new lives as free people. The Civil War sealed the fate of slavery only to open a contest over the meaning of freedom. This volume of Freedom documents an important chapter in that contest.

The author traces the history of American slavery from its 17th-century origins to its demise during the civil war, and shows haw slavery evolved and developed within the changing context of American history.