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Rating: 
Summary: Reviews
Review: "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 "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 "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 "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 [Toronto] "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 "As Ira Berlin makes abundantly clear, racism was an ideology crucial for creating an intellectual and emotional climate that would allow slavery to exist. It gave an institution, albeit a 'peculiar' one, the required veneer of 'reason'...Berlin explodes several myths and sets in their place a history that honors the complexity of the American past with an unswerving, unsentimental gaze. One myth that Berlin seizes is that of the Old South, the common belief that slavery was for the most part situated below the Mason-Dixon Line. Slavery became a southern phenomenon only after 200 years of American history. These 200 years are Berlin's subject, as he tracks the black presence throughout early America, emphasizing in vivid detail the diversity of slave existence, urban and rural. He underscores the fact that as America was being constructed by slave labor, slaves were living their own lives and creating their own culture, a syncretic mix of African origins...Berlin's argument, and it is brilliantly posed, is that slavery, with all its resonance, haunts America even as the new century is about to begin."
--Michelle Cliff, SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS "Berlin offers a complex picture of how slaves etched out small freedoms under dire circumstances in early America. Their existence was defined by religion, family structure and African inheritance--not just the fact that they were slaves. Many Thousands Gone is not an apology for slavery, but a testament to the willpower of a people to define their own lives under the most dismal conditions."
--Ronald D. Lankford, ROANOKE TIMES "Rather than focus on slavery in the antebellum South, Berlin provides a revealing look at the diverse lives and cultures of the early slaves."
--WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD "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 M. Fredrickson, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "This meticulous scholarly 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 masters 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 "Ira Berlin, one of this nation's foremost scholars on the slave era...presents a thorough and extensive examination of early slavery...[He] considers the evolution of slavery, and the changing nature of how slaves were treated. Though he never understates the violence and domination practiced by slaveholders, Berlin introduces the notion that slavery during its first two centuries was a 'negotiated relationship,' even if that relationship was 'so profoundly asymmetrical' that most discount even the 'notion of negotiation' between the owner and the owned."
--Rene Graham, BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE "In Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin has produced an intriguing and compelling new interpretation that is one of the most significant books about slavery in several years...Berlin's work is an impressive and masterfully written narrative. He provides a clearer picture of slavery, which has often been clouded by imprecise accounts. As he astutely concludes, slavery's effects still persist as an unwelcome guest in American society."
--John A. Hardin, LEXINGTON HERALD LEADER "Today's correct historian can be as guilty of over simplification as yesterday's apologist for slavery, but Berlin scrupulously resists any such temptations. His emphasis is on subtlety and complexity...According to Berlin the history of the first two of slavery's three centuries in North America reveals nothing so much as change, ambiguity and 'messy, inchoate reality.' For this reason alone his book has great value and importance; it is also lucid, measured and entirely persuasive...Indeed, for all the oppression it documents, Many Thousands Gone can be read not as a chronicle of denial and enslavement but as evidence of the irresistible impulse for freedom. In this sense Berlin's book is an affirmation, not merely of the fortitude and dignity of the slaves (a matter of grave concern to many of today's historians) but of the capacity of American democracy--despite its shortcomings--to live up to its promises."
--Jonathan Yardley, WASHINGTON POST Top 10 Pick for 1998, Nonfiction Category, Christian Science Monitor "[This is] a monumental, sweeping study of the evolution of America's 'peculiar institution' from the earliest white settlement through the early Republic period. Berlin, one of the foremost historians of American slavery, has written an addition to the canon of essential works on the subject...Many Thousands Gone makes clear that slavery at no point achieved the 'stable maturity' that many historians have ascribed to the 19th century period."
--Neal M. Rosendorf, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR "Ira Berlin has helped to shape the recent literature on slavery in the United States...Many Thousands Gone represents Mr. Berlin's most ambitious undertaking to date and a sharp temporal departure from his previous books, for he has backtracked from the 19th century to write a 200-year history of slavery on the North American mainland that begins with the African background to England's settlement of the colonial Chesapeake in the early 17th century...
Rating: 
Summary: The first 2 centuries of slavery
Review: Ira Berlin's MANY THOUSANDS GONE records the first two centuries of slavery in the present day United States AFTER European settlement. More thought-provoking and less dogmatic than Eugene Genovese's ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL, Berlin more fully makes the distinction between the various forms the system of slavery took in different regions and at different times in the period before Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin put new vigor into the old institution. The book is broken down into three main parts: Societies with Slaves (or the Charter Generation), Slave Societies (or the Plantation Generation) and the Revolutionary Generation (ending in approximately 1810 to 1820). Within each of these time frames, the book looks at the peculiar ways in which the institution of slavery developed in Virginia and the Upper South, South Carolina and the Lower South, the North and the Lower Mississippi Valley (Louisiana and Florida). Further, each such chapter focuses on the evolution of slavery in each region within each generation. The book compares indenturement (and apprenticeships) with slavery and also describes how the influx of Africans from interior Africa swamped the Atlantic Creole populace, contributing to the idea of racial superiority (of whites) and the development of ideas about miscegnation as a polluter of racial purity. The charter generation and later "creolized" generations were more likely to be able to win or purchase freedom whereas each influx of non-creolized Africans contributed to the "Africanization" of the black populace and to harsher restrictions on slaves and other black & biracial persons. The book looks at de facto property-ownership among slaves and the development of the slave economy and its importance in the greater economy. Berlin also looks at the early interactions between the races (going so far as to point out that most persons of mixed race early on came not from relations between white masters and black slaves (whether or not consensual) but between indentured or lower class whites and slaves or free blacks. He also touches on the increasing competition between the white working class and blacks (enslaved and free) and the growth of vehement anti-black sentiments among working class whites. Informative and stimulating, the book infrequently still tends to generalize such as with the implicit assumption of the general validity of the Woodson Thesis that free blacks generally tended to be more likely to own relatives - which was true (by law - see FREE BLACKS IN NORFOLK, VIRGINIA by Tommy L. Bogger) in places such as Virginia (where Carter Woodson's father James Henry Woodson hailed - see BLACK CONFEDERATES AND AFRO-YANKEES IN CIVIL WAR VIRGINIA by Ervin L. Jordan, Jr.) but was clearly not the case in places such as Louisiana and South Carolina (see THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLE by Gary B. Mills, BLACK SLAVEOWNERS by Larry Kroger and BLACK MASTERS by Michael P. Johnson & James L. Roark). Despite such expected errors in so comprehensive a work, MANY THOUSANDS GONE makes for a great read!
Rating:
Summary: The first 2 centuries of slavery
Review: Ira Berlin's MANY THOUSANDS GONE records the first two centuries of slavery in the present day United States AFTER European settlement. More thought-provoking and less dogmatic than Eugene Genovese's ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL, Berlin more fully makes the distinction between the various forms the system of slavery took in different regions and at different times in the period before Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin put new vigor into the old institution. The book is broken down into three main parts: Societies with Slaves (or the Charter Generation), Slave Societies (or the Plantation Generation) and the Revolutionary Generation (ending in approximately 1810 to 1820). Within each of these time frames, the book looks at the peculiar ways in which the institution of slavery developed in Virginia and the Upper South, South Carolina and the Lower South, the North and the Lower Mississippi Valley (Louisiana and Florida). Further, each such chapter focuses on the evolution of slavery in each region within each generation. The book compares indenturement (and apprenticeships) with slavery and also describes how the influx of Africans from interior Africa swamped the Atlantic Creole populace, contributing to the idea of racial superiority (of whites) and the development of ideas about miscegnation as a polluter of racial purity. The charter generation and later "creolized" generations were more likely to be able to win or purchase freedom whereas each influx of non-creolized Africans contributed to the "Africanization" of the black populace and to harsher restrictions on slaves and other black & biracial persons. The book looks at de facto property-ownership among slaves and the development of the slave economy and its importance in the greater economy. Berlin also looks at the early interactions between the races (going so far as to point out that most persons of mixed race early on came not from relations between white masters and black slaves (whether or not consensual) but between indentured or lower class whites and slaves or free blacks. He also touches on the increasing competition between the white working class and blacks (enslaved and free) and the growth of vehement anti-black sentiments among working class whites. Informative and stimulating, the book infrequently still tends to generalize such as with the implicit assumption of the general validity of the Woodson Thesis that free blacks generally tended to be more likely to own relatives - which was true (by law - see FREE BLACKS IN NORFOLK, VIRGINIA by Tommy L. Bogger) in places such as Virginia (where Carter Woodson's father James Henry Woodson hailed - see BLACK CONFEDERATES AND AFRO-YANKEES IN CIVIL WAR VIRGINIA by Ervin L. Jordan, Jr.) but was clearly not the case in places such as Louisiana and South Carolina (see THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLE by Gary B. Mills, BLACK SLAVEOWNERS by Larry Kroger and BLACK MASTERS by Michael P. Johnson & James L. Roark). Despite such expected errors in so comprehensive a work, MANY THOUSANDS GONE makes for a great read!
Rating: 
Summary: Perhaps the finest book on American slavery ever written.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Ira does it again.
Review: This book added a great deal to my knowledge of the first two centuries of slavery in North America. Berlin's primary document research is marvelous and the details that he was able to find out about slave life during this period are astounding. Berlin found out that the process of dehumanizing slaves was one that took time and varied from region to region, and he goes into specific economic and cultural factors that played the role in establishing and keeping slavery in the states.
Often the creation of the peculiar institution and the diversity of slave life is glossed over in textbooks. They ignore the important role that economic factors play from region to region. Berlin argues that the north did not have fewer slaves because northerners were more conscientious or less racist than southerners(as many would like to think), but because the majority of them simply could not profit as well from slave labor. An excellent scholarly work that shows wide diversity in the lives of slaves durring the first two centuries of its existance.
Rating:
Summary: Oustanding (with one caveat).
Review: This book is, along with Morgan's work on the Lowcountry and Eugene Genovese's entire corpus, the outstanding work in the field. Berlin organizes his material both spatially and temporally, which allows him to give a feeling for the distinctions across the decades and from place to place. Even experts in American history will learn from every page. My only caveat is that, despite the enormous effort that obviously went into this book, it came out with a plethora of grammatical errors. False parallelisms, single possessives in place of plurals, and numerous other basic grammatical mistakes mar the text, so that the careful reader cannot help but be distracted from the actual topic. Alas, this certainly colors my impression of what otherwise is an outstanding piece of work; too bad. Prof. Berlin's editors at Harvard definitely dropped the ball.
Rating:
Summary: Oustanding (with one caveat).
Review: To most Americans, including most scholars, slavery in the USA is usually thought of as chattel slavery associated with the plantation economies of the Antebellum South. This is a book on slavery in North America in the two centuries prior to the antebellum period. Berlin takes pains to present slavery over this extended period of time as historically dynamic and regionally diverse. Berlin is excellent at showing how changes in the Atlantic economy, political events such as the American Revolution, and international diplomacy all contributed to changes in the world experienced by slaves and slaveholders. This is true history from below emphasizing the experience of slaves. Berlin is particularly good at exploring the rich regional diversity of the slave experience in North America. This will simply be the standard book on this topic for decades to come. Written with grace, some passion, and an excellent bibliography.
Rating:
Summary: Nuanced Analysis of Important Topic
Review: To most Americans, including most scholars, slavery in the USA is usually thought of as chattel slavery associated with the plantation economies of the Antebellum South. This is a book on slavery in North America in the two centuries prior to the antebellum period. Berlin takes pains to present slavery over this extended period of time as historically dynamic and regionally diverse. Berlin is excellent at showing how changes in the Atlantic economy, political events such as the American Revolution, and international diplomacy all contributed to changes in the world experienced by slaves and slaveholders. This is true history from below emphasizing the experience of slaves. Berlin is particularly good at exploring the rich regional diversity of the slave experience in North America. This will simply be the standard book on this topic for decades to come. Written with grace, some passion, and an excellent bibliography.
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