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. James Walvin Times Higher Education SupplementĪs Ira Berlin makes abundantly clear, racism was an ideology crucial for creating an intellectual and emotional climate that would allow slavery to exist. It is, quite simply, a book of major importance for all historians of North America.

is moreover a book with powerful implications for anyone interested in the wider history of 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. This is a deceptive book, for it is not simply a general account of slavery in North America. 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.

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. 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. Occasionally we are rewarded with a brave soul willing to impose shape and direction on what has become, for many, a prodigiously confusing historiography.

Berlin many thousands gone