Slavery, enslaved persons and abolition of slavery Books, bestsellers and new releases

WW Norton & Co sojournertruth

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Book SynopsisA monumental biography of one of the most important black women of the nineteenth century.

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£21.53

WW Norton & Co American Slavery American Freedom Rei

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Book SynopsisThoughtful, suggestive and highly readable.New York Times Book ReviewTrade Review"Profoundly important.... Every page of Morgan's book speaks of a sensitive understanding of human nature, as well as of a scrupulous attention to scholarly exactitude." -- J.H. Plumb - New York Review of Books

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£14.24

WW Norton & Co Frederick Douglass

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Book SynopsisA masterpiece.[W]ill rightfully assume its place as the standard biography of a truly great figure in the nation's past. New York NewsdayTrade Review"A detailed, finely written portrait of the imposing 19th-century leader." -- David Levering Lewis - The New York Times Book Review"Stunning... This illuminating portrait dispenses with the myths." -- Financial Times"Absolutely nonpareil…" -- Nell Irvin Painter - The Boston Globe"Compelling... Suggests that the Age of Douglass was this nation’s greatest epoch... What a time. What a book." -- Los Angeles Times

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£15.19

WW Norton & Co Antislavery Appeal American Abolitionism After

2 in stock

Book Synopsis"A fresh and provocative contribution . . . . the clearest, most penetrating, and best-informed study of the post-1830 antislavery movement that exists." —Richard Bardolph, North Carolina Historical Review

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£18.00

LUP - University of Michigan Press The Captive Stage Performance and the Proslavery

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£25.60

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£94.95

Harvard University Press Many Thousands Gone The First Two Centuries of

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Book SynopsisA 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.Trade ReviewThe 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 *In his pathbreaking book on slavery's first two centuries in America, Ira Berlin argues that our historical memory is incomplete, based almost entirely on 19th-century portraits of the "peculiar institution." Underscoring differences within the North American slave experience over time and place, Berlin paints a much more complex picture of slavery's origins and formative years...[and] skillfully unravels slavery's complex evolution. Berlin's foremost contribution is his nuanced analysis of the creolization process. His book is the best study of black life before the "plantation revolution" and its mainspring, slavery, which locked African Americans into an inferior class defined by color...Race, then, as Berlin reminds us, like class, is the product of a particular kind of social construction. It required major demolition—the Civil War—to begin to renovate the structure that slavery and racism built. -- John David Smith * News and Observer *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. -- Renée 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 *By concentrating on slavery in North America from the early years of settlement through the Revolution, Ira Berlin restores historical depth and a human face to a field usually mired in angry polemic and narrow quanitification. This rich and well-written narrative—the best book on American slavery since Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll—challenges traditional accounts...Many Thousands Gone shows how we must place American history and the contemporary American dilemma of race and cultural heritage in the hemispheric and Atlantic context to comprehend fully America's peculiarities and uniqueness. * Foreign Affairs *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...[He] has written a major synthesis that will surely draw praise from the academy. -- Robert L. Paquette * Washington Times *In each society and in each generation slaves adjusted and adapted to their conditions. Blacks never were exclusively the hapless victims of the "white devil" of history or the obsequious Sambos of the "Gone With The Wind" model. Berlin's greatest achievement is finally correcting the misconceptions black and white Americans have about how slavery operated in this nation. -- Gregory Kane * Baltimore Sun *Berlin, who has already contributed significantly to the literature, here brings together in a magisterial synthesis much of what has now been learned about slave life during its first two centuries within the present United States...Berlin's achievement is to order the resulting variety by identifying four different regions with four different economies (the Chesapeake, the eastern tidewater from South Carolina to Florida, the Mississippi Valley, and the North) and by dividing the social developments of two centuries in each region into three periods, which he designates as the charter generations, the plantation generations, and the Revolutionary generations, stopping short of the heyday of slavery in the antebellum decades of the nineteenth century. -- Edmund S. Morgan * New York Review of Books *Synthesizing a generation of scholarship, Berlin provides a sweeping survey of slavery and black life in North America (the European colonies that became the United States) 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 Book Review *An original, eye-opening study in which Berlin most persuasively argues that slavery was no monolithic institution but one that evolved in different ways in different places, and did not become the 'slave society' so well known to students of American history until relatively late in its long, painful development. -- Jonathan Yardley * Washington Post Book World *No general synthesis existed to pull all of [the] fragments of scholarship together and present a coherent narrative of the first two centuries of North American slavery—until now. Ira Berlin's splendid study tells us what we need to know about how the peculiar institution of antebellum America got that way over the previous 200 years. The scholarship of this study is astonishing. Berlin appears to have read every secondary source and every published primary source—not all of this in English—relevant to the subject. Yet this burden of scholarship does not weigh down the text with dull, heavy prose. Quite the contrary; Berlin has accomplished a small miracle of organization, compression, and skillful exposition...Many Thousands Gone is essential reading for all those interested in the history of African Americans and of race relations in this country. Berlin writes this history more from the viewpoint of the slaves than that of the master. This is all to the good, for it helps redress the balance of most studies of slavery. Black people herein are not merely victims; they help make their own history, a history in which many of them gained freedom and formed a distinctive culture long before the Emancipation Proclamation. Indeed, this is as much a history of freedom as of slavery, a story of success against the odds as well as a story of exploitation and cruelty. -- James M. McPherson * Journal of Blacks in Higher Education *[Berlin] draws on recent scholarship to sketch in the contours of the slave experience in colonial Florida and Louisiana, reminding us that the ancestors of many black Americans learned to speak Spanish or French long before they ever heard English. Berlin paints deftly with a broad brush, and his trim narrative is informed and gripping...Berlin documents the high hopes for freedom, the desperate attempts to gain liberty, and the deep sense of disappointment and betrayal that led slaves to form conspiracies from Richmond, Virginia to Pointe Coupee, Louisiana. -- Peter H. Wood * Brightleaf *Berlin crafts a deft synthesis of the many regional studies that have slowly been changing our understanding of slavery...No one before Berlin has made sense of these works altogether, as a unified field of inquiry. There is originality in Berlin's synthesis, as historical events and cultural tendencies take on new and fresh meanings. Further, his distillation of the burgeoning field is highly valuable. It is a brilliant summary for general readers and newcomers to the field; it will be a standard work for graduate students preparing for exams, and many a burdened faculty member who needs a quick overview in order to prepare lectures will dog-ear its pages. -- Joyce E. Chaplin * Reviews in American History *Many Thousands Gone is an investigation of the ways in which freedom and slavery were negotiated between slaves and slave owners, making the point that no matter how powerful the slave owner became, the culture and the actions of the slave were never completely in his power. Thus, the history of slavery becomes, in part, a history of strategies--some partial failures, some partial successes--for establishing African American self-determination in a time of slavery...By beginning with the assumption that slavery was not one thing but was instituted and experienced in a variety of distinct ways, Many Thousands Gone allows readers to glimpse a more nuanced picture of the strivings and accomplishments of the souls and bodies caught in slavery's meshes, enriching rather than compromising the understanding of the institution's true harmful nature. -- Thomas Cassidy * Magill's Literary Annual *In his pathbreaking book on slavery's first two centuries in America, Ira Berlin argues that our historical memory is incomplete, based almost entirely on 19th-century portraits of the 'peculiar institution.' Underscoring differences within the North America slave experience over time and place, Berlin paints a much more complex picture of slavery's origins and formative years. -- John David Smith * Raleigh News & Observer *This important study successfully synthesizes insights of the past 40 years while advancing new scholarship which emphasizes the shifting definition of both race and slavery in North America...Many Thousands Gone is a well-written, provocative reappraisal of the first 200 years of North American slavery. -- Marion Lucas * Bowling Green News *[Many Thousands Gone] is a serious study that the general public will find interesting and useful...As an introduction to the new history of slavery in North America, especially in the long era prior to the 'Old South,' one could do little better than to buy this book. -- Douglas B. Chambers * The Commercial Appeal *A noted historian with other books on slavery, Mr. Berlin focuses in this latest work on what slavery meant during the 1600s and 1700s. And one of his major points, carefully documented and argued, is that slavery and race then were not always what we think of them as being now...What's refreshing about his analysis is how many layers of African-American life he is able to penetrate. Drawing upon Dutch, French, Spanish and English documents, he looks globally at how the African diaspora of slaves shaped North American communities. -- Meta G. Carstarphen * Dallas Morning News *Berlin has written an imaginative, detailed account of American slavery from its origins at the beginning of the 17th century through the Revolution...A major contribution to the study of slavery in the United States. -- Anthony O. Edmonds * Library Journal *Many Thousands Gone...is a sweeping scholarly study of four kinds of slave society...those in the Northern colonies, the Chesapeake Bay area, the Carolina low country, and the lower Mississippi valley...One of Mr. Berlin's most striking realizations....[was how] slaves had had such different experiences of slavery. Some had been skilled laborers, others small farmers, still others plantation workers...'What Ira has done is to etch the patterns,' says Ronald Hoffman, director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, in Williamsburg, Virginia. 'He's developed a model of how slavery changed that's going to be enormously important'...More than just highlighting diversity, the patterns that Mr. Berlin draws in his scholarship also throw into relief changes in the nature of slavery...Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University, says, 'In a way that no one else has done, Berlin takes the entire area of what became the United States and gives us a genuine transcontinental perspective. That has tremendous force in driving home the point that slavery was never static, but an evolving institution...The field today is ripe for broad debate and Berlin's superb synthesis is just the work to spark it.' -- Karen J. Winkler * Chronicle of Higher Education *Through his scholarship and leadership, Ira Berlin has recast the way we conceive of the history of African Americans and their relationship to other Americans...Covering a vast terrain and chronological span, the author gives us a fuller portrayal of slavery's formative stages in this country than we have ever possessed. The book is a work of synthesis, harvesting the research and insights of hundreds of historians who have focused on one place, time, or issue. Though the book contains no original archival research, it is a rare student of the American past who will not be surprised by something in virtually every chapter. It is the pattern of slavery that is significant here, the variations and consistencies across the continent and across the centuries. Berlin follows no one historiographical tradition, but weaves among several, taking the best of each...[The] combination of context and change, as well as negotiation and material grounding, gives Berlin a nuanced, yet powerful way of understanding slavery. The keys for Berlin's interpretation are not simple and familiar ones such as 'race' or 'capitalism,' but distinctly complicated conceptions with which we have become familiar in this decade: negotiation, complexity, agency, multiplicity, indeterminacy, and interaction. Berlin manages to portray slavery as both fundamentally important and highly contingent, an analytical juggling act that would have failed in less skillful hands. -- Edward L. Ayers * The Historian *The history of slavery in North America is not as simple, clear-cut or tidy as is often believed. That is the message of this impeccably presented history of American slavery from 1619, when John Rolfe brought 'twenty Negars' to the Jamestown colony, to the 1820s, when the spirit of emancipation began to take hold in the North...[Berlin's] distinctions have continuing resonance, as [he] shows that once a society with slaves became a slave society, all blacks--free or not--could come to be regarded as slaves: in short, how an economic system became racism...The book holds many surprises gleaned from the facts, whether in its portrait of New York as a major slave city or its descriptions of free enterprise at work among slaves. The economic and historical research presented here is impressive. But what gives the book an additional dimension is its deftly employed social insights. * Publishers Weekly *Rather than focus on the much studied slavery of the antebellum South, Berlin examines the earlier history of slavery throughout North America and how it affected the consequent nature and evolution of the peculiar institution...He traces the first African presence in the Americas to a 'charter generation' that was multilingual and multicultural, through the 'plantation generation' that adjusted its African culture to the various regions of the U.S., and, finally, the 'revolutionary generation' that began to challenge U.S. ideals of liberty and freedom in the face of slavery. Throughout this fascinating book, Berlin deftly outlines the human negotiations that went on even in so unequal a relationship as master-slave. -- Vanessa Bush * Booklist *In a real contribution to the literature of American slavery, Berlin sketches the complex evolution of that institution in the American colonies and the early US...[He] traces the development of a 'society with slaves'—that is, in which slavery was a marginal institution that represented only one among many labor sources—into a 'slave society' in which slavery was not only central to the economy but formed the basis of all social institutions...A cogently argued, well-researched narrative that points to the complex nature of American slavery, the falsity of many of our stereotypes, and the unique world wrought by the slaves themselves. * Kirkus Reviews *Berlin's adept mixture of economic and social history enlarges our understanding of colonial slavery and contributes fascinating new insights...[N]ovel insights permeate nearly every page...Authoritative, original, beautifully organized and composed, Many Thousands Gone is a striking combination of black history and the study of the evolution of slavery. Any reader intrigued by the tumultuous, shifting account of early American slavery and the people who made it need look no further than this state-of-the-art achievement by a masterful historian. -- Graham Russell Hodges * America *Berlin repeatedly recalibrates the received story of slavery, all the while revising the record with numerous therapeutic reinterpretations...To see enslaved people as Berlin does, that is sequentially as the charter generations, the plantation generations, and the revolutionary generations, is to see them as different populations facing different concerns at different times. In this way he restores to millions of black people a degree of personhood that is finally profoundly liberating. For if enslaved people are seen as participating actively in their own social formation, they are then granted fundamental humanity that the proponents of chattel slavery tried so hard to eradicate. * American Studies International *[Berlin presents] a full-scale interpretation of the complexity and diversity of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century African-American slave life and work. His five-hundred-page book,Many Thousands Gone, is the most comprehensive study yet produced of the first two centuries of slavery in North America. Berlin is, of course, well qualified for his ambitious task, for he has spent his entire career studying American slavery and facilitating the work of other scholars in this field...Berlin has his own distinctive argument, which endows the book with originality and power. -- Richard S. Dunn * William and Mary Quarterly *In this book, Berlin, has produced a masterly synthesis of the vast body of research hundreds of scholars have done on the first two centuries of slavery in British, French, and Spanish North America, a portrait of highly fortuitous change that should leave a telltale stamp on all future treatments of New World slavery. -- David Brion Davis * American Historical Review *Table of Contents* Prologue: Making Slavery, Making Race * Societies with Slaves: The Charter Generations * Emergence of Atlantic Creoles in the Chesapeake * Expansion of Creole Society in the North * Divergent Paths in the Lowcountry * Devolution in the Lower Mississippi Valley * Slave Societies: The Plantation Generations * The Tobacco Revolution in the Chesapeake * The Rice Revolution in the Lowcountry * Growth and the Transformation of Black Life in the North * Stagnation and Transformation in the Lower Mississippi Valley * Slave and Free: The Revolutionary Generations * The Slow Death of Slavery in the North * The Union of African-American Society in the Upper South * Fragmentation in the Lower South * Slavery and Freedom in the Lower Mississippi Valley * Epilogue: Making Race, Making Slavery * Tables * Abbreviations * Notes * Acknowledgments * Index

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Harvard University Press Soul by Soul Life Inside the Antebellum Slave

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Book SynopsisTaking us inside the New Orleans slave market, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.Trade ReviewThe focus of this fine book, which is at once doggedly scrupulous and quietly passionate, is the slave market that operated in New Orleans in the years before the Civil War… An area of recent and still tentative study has to do with the effect the slaves had on the people who bought and sold them; to this Johnson makes important and original contributions… In what it tells us about the slaves, Soul by Soul adds more detail to what is by now a staggering body of information. It is in telling us more about what slavery did to the men and women who stood on the privileged side of the divide that Johnson performs his most useful service. Slavery brutalized its victims, but it also corrupted its masters. It was, in every single regard, unspeakable. -- Jonathan Yardley * Washington Post Book World *A forceful reminder that life in the Crescent City after the battle wasn't all toleration… [This is an] elegant and intelligent book. -- Nicholas Lemann * New Yorker *Just when readers might have thought nothing new could be written about slavery, Walter Johnson's behind-the-scenes look at the New Orleans slave market unmasks the brutalities of trafficking in human flesh in a terrifying, unforgettable manner. Mr. Johnson's carefully researched saga picks up after the 1808 U.S. ban on trans-Atlantic slave trading. Far from shutting down slavery, the prohibition simply boosted domestic slave trafficking… Soul by Soul gives context to its content, making it a fascinating 'insider's' view of a world created by slavery. -- Meta G. Carstarphen * Dallas Morning News *[Soul by Soul has] an interesting and compelling argument… Where Johnson succeeds…[is in] using the New Orleans slave market, its contents and its customers as a way to understand a culture that no longer exists. -- Matthew DeBord * Salon *Johnson's extremely rich and subtle work, the first in-depth look at the slave markets, never lets the reader forget the reality that this was a trade in human beings… Among the most striking and important aspects of the book is the way Johnson makes clear the resistance of enslaved African-Americans to becoming mere items of property… Johnson teaches us that, despite the insistence of white slaveholders that slaves were simply possessions, enslaved African-Americans routinely asserted their humanity and forced slaveholders to take this into account when bringing people to market. At the same time that Johnson keeps the spotlight squarely on the humanity of enslaved African-Americans, he also presents a complicated account of those who went to the markets to buy… Anyone interested in American history must strive to understand something about slavery, and as Johnson shows us, the event of the sale of one human being to another is at the center of the story of slavery. The horror of that transaction remains so powerful that even today descendants of its victims, as well as of its perpetrators, are still trying to comprehend it. Walter Johnson's important book makes a valuable contribution to that endeavor. -- Judith Weisenfeld * Newsday *Walter Johnson has gone where no historian has gone before: inside the slave markets of the antebellum South… Johnson, through his book, has spoken for the unknown thousands who couldn't speak for themselves… Johnson has given a voice to those voiceless slaves whose descendants owe it to their ancestors to read this book. -- Gregory Kane * Baltimore Sun *A challenging, eye-opening study that deserves a wide audience… Johnson delves into the contradictions and complexities that arise when human beings are treated as commodities… He gets inside the heads of slaves, traders and buyers in order to explore the desires, fears and strategies they brought to this inhuman transaction… Soul by Soul shines a penetrating light on the brutal heart of the South's peculiar institution. -- Fritz Lanham * Houston Chronicle *Soul by Soul is a stunning excavation of the past, a book that is sure to be read and debated for years to come. Walter Johnson creates a common identity for the slaves by letting their voices give shape to the narrative. In an age such as ours, so premised on individual liberty, the author performs a kind of moral autopsy on the mindset of slave owning. -- Jason Berry * Gambit Weekly *Johnson tells us many things about [the] commodification of human beings, some of which you probably know and others that are more surprising… Johnson's book covers wide territory, from the petty encounters of small slave traders to the extraordinary power of slavery in the southern economy. -- Peter Walker * Financial Times *Johnson provides the fullest, most penetrating examination of the antebellum slave market to date. Using slave narratives, court records, planters' letters, and more, Johnson enters the slave pens and showrooms of the New Orleans slave market to observe how slavery turned men and women into merchandise and how slaves resisted such efforts to steal their humanity. He tracks the slaves from their march to the market to the terrifying moments of sale and adaptation to new masters, places, and work. Johnson's original, important, and brilliantly presented book makes a case for the slave market as 'best place to see slavery.' It was there that self-interest, concepts of race, and the slave 'community' came together to reveal how white men traded their own souls for a stake in human property. An essential book for anyone who wants to understand why slavery matters. -- Randall M. Miller * Library Journal *This extraordinary study is a flesh-and-blood daily history of the slave market. Johnson takes readers inside the Dixie slave pens and traders' coffles (long rows of slaves manacled and chained to one another)… Using former slave survivors' narratives, letters written by slaveholders, docket records of cases of disputed slave slaves and Southern medical and agricultural journals, Johnson interweaves the voices of traders, buyers, auctioneers and the slaves themselves… The evil business of slavery has seldom been exposed with so much humanity and insight as in this eloquent study, scholarly yet wholly accessible, a compelling cross-sectional microcosm of millions of human tragedies. * Publishers Weekly *Johnson selected the operations of the market to depict the variegated processes that turned a person into a commodity. Sales could be complicated transactions. Their objects, the enslaved persons, could always ruin value by escape or suicide, and consequently traders and purchasers of people sometimes conceded minimal humanity to placate those in their thrall. Organized with a blessed eschewal of academese, Johnson's work is a superior examination of the speculation in slaves as individuals conducted it. -- Gilbert Taylor * Booklist *[Johnson] shows that the slaves were able to shape, albeit in small measure, the outcomes of sales… [He] illuminates not just the slaves, but the white Southerners who bought and sold then, offering particular insight into the ways white people constructed their own identities by dreaming of the slaves they would one day buy… A refreshing, elegantly written angle on antebellum slavery. * Kirkus Reviews *The slave pen lay at the depths of slavery's hell, and no one has explored that abyss better than Walter Johnson. Soul by Soul brilliantly bares the base meaning of chattel bondage—and by extension antebellum Southern society—by inspecting the mechanism that produced and reproduced slavery in the nineteenth-century United States and in the process defined slave, slave trader, and slaveholder. -- Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North AmericaWalter Johnson's lucid and breathtaking book uses the spectacle of the slave market to open new windows onto the history and peculiarities of American capitalist culture. He persuasively shows that masters were not simply buying labor but fantasies—fantasies of power, control, pleasure, even their own perceived benevolence. This is why the slave market was like no other market in the history of modern capitalism, and why Soul by Soul is like no other book. -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working ClassSoul by Soul mercilessly demonstrates why the slave South built high walls around its auction blocks. It then tears down those walls. In insisting on the centrality of slave sales in antebellum Southern life, Johnson precisely captures the logic, complexity, brutality, falsity and, above all, the drama of a world built around a market in human beings. -- David Roediger, editor of Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means To Be WhiteAs central as the slave trade was to the experience of slavery, there has been no in-depth study of the daily life of the trade. Walter Johnson fills the conspicuous void. With this original and innovative book, Johnson skillfully unveils the manipulations and the negotiations of the slave market. Soul by Soul tells a unique and compelling story. -- Deborah Gray White, author of Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation SouthJohnson takes us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest and busiest in the South, and discovers that the buyers and sellers of slaves could easily mix the language and values associated with paternalism and commercialism. Unlike later historians, they saw no conflict between their needs for status and sound business practice… [Johnson] advances the original and potentially controversial argument that to be truly 'white' in the Old South one had to own slaves. -- George M. Fredrickson * New York Review of Books *It is not often that we get an academic monograph as smart and well-written as this one. On almost every page Johnson has something fresh and original to say about the old chestnuts of historical debate: paternalism, honor, miscegenation, slave culture. Soul by Soul reaffirms the importance of making sure our graduate programs remain open to even the most outlandish intellectual fads, which very often are honest efforts to see the world in new ways. -- Lawrence N. Powell * Times-Picayune *What distinguishes Soul by Soul from other recent works on the experience of slavery, and, indeed, the history of the antebellum South, is the innovative use of court records. Johnson…begins by asserting the importance of seeing the moment of sale through the eyes of the people who were sold and not just through the eyes of slaveowners and traders. A careful reading of the voluminous quantity of published slave narratives forms the foundation of the volume but much of the insight comes from an exploration of roughly two hundred disputed slave transactions that were brought before the Louisiana Supreme Court… No research is without flaws, and no scholar impervious to the claim that something should have been done differently. Johnson carefully crafts his narrative to acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of his evidence… By focusing on the moment of sale, and analyzing what it meant to both slaveowner and slave, Soul by Soul establishes itself as perhaps the most innovative work on slavery published in the last twenty-five years. -- Robert Wolff * H-Net Reviews *Soul by Soul is the first modern study to deal specifically with the workings of the American slave market. This is the subject that the defenders of slavery preferred not to discuss. Instead, they liked to emphasize the paternalistic aspects of slavery—the natural bonds linking master and servant and the cradle-to-grave care that distinguished the lot of the Southern bondsman from that of the Northern 'wage slave'… This is an important book, well researched and clearly written. It describes how slaves were bought and sold, and what these transactions meant for the parties involved. It shows that, even at the best of times, slaves lived in the shadow of the slave market. -- Howard Temperley * Times Literary Supplement *Soul by Soul is an important contribution to the historiography of slavery. -- Adam Linker * BlackBookshelf.com *This book should not be read in part or assigned as a casual reference. It stands as a whole, an effort to reconstruct a sense of an entire way of life by focusing on one scene in detail. Meticulously researched and copiously annotated, Soul by Soul is at once well written and accessible to any serious minded YA reader. * Kliatt *A richly textured history of human trade in the antebellum South, covering a period during which some two million slave sales were meticulously recorded. Johnson's haunting study centers on New Orleans, the site of North America's largest slave market… Johnson looks at the roles played by slaves, traders, and slaveholders in the nasty enterprise of selling life… The title of Johnson's book is not casually chosen, for he seeks to grasp the impact of slavery on the very souls of everyone it touched. This ambition takes his work beyond that of historians who have traced the trajectory of the slave trade through commercial records only. -- Randal M. Jelks * Books & Culture *This excellent book provides a wealth of new details about the buying and selling of black people in the antebellum South and remarkable insights into the minds of both the seller and the sold. * Arkansas Historical Quarterly *Johnson examines the economics of the internal slave trade as well as the interdependencies among the actors involved. Focusing on New Orleans, which had the largest trade in the country, he analyzes the philosophies and nuances of the trade as well as the centrality of the trade in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. * Law and Social Inquiry *Table of ContentsIntroduction: A Person with a Price The Chattel Principle Between the Prices Making a World Out of Slaves Turning People into Products Reading Bodies and Marking Race Acts of Sale Life in the Shadow of the Slave Market Epilogue: Southern History and the Slave Trade Abbreviations Notes Acknowledgments Index

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Harvard University Press Abolitionists Abroad American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa

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a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.

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Harvard University Press Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

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Book SynopsisNo book more vividly explains the horror of American slavery and the emotional impetus behind the antislavery movement than Douglass's Narrative. In his Introduction, Robert B. Stepto reexamines the extraordinary life and achievement of a man who escaped slavery to become a leading abolitionist and one of America's most important writers.Table of Contents* Introduction Robert B. Stepto * Note on the Text * Chronology of Frederick Douglass's Life Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass * Selected Bibliography

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John Wiley and Sons Ltd Servitude in Modern Times

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Book SynopsisThis book offers a comparative analysis of the major systems of servitude present in the world since 1500. Slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, indentured service and convict labour all provided labour and service through the legal subjection of one person to another, but remained very different.Trade Review'Servitude in Modern Times explores and explains the great variety of unfree labour systems that have flourished in one or another part of the world under the influence of the rise of capitalism. The book's scope is exemplary, covering serfdom and debt bondage as well as chattel slavery, and ranging from Europe and the Americas to Africa and the Islamic world. The world of unfree labour and the movements of emancipation usually constitute two separate realms of study; here they are most fruitfully brought together. While condemning the essential cruelty of servitude, M. L. Bush conveys a historical understanding of systems of oppression that were regarded as perfectly civilized until very recently, and new forms of which survive into the present.' Robin Blackburn, University of Essex 'The author takes as his subject practically every form of labour, apart from freewage labour, that has existed between the sixteenth century and the present. His concern, however, is less with the persistence of archaic institutions than with the emergence of new commercially driven forms of bondage, among them the slave empires of the new World and the so-called new serfdom of Eastern Europe. Far from being a relic left over from earlier times, servitude is shown as playing a key role in the shaping of the modern world. The evidence for this is so overwhelming that one wonders why it has so frequently been overlooked...As a historian hitherto principally concerned with European social stratification, Bush has no time for handwringing over the injustices of the past, preferring to emphasize the positive contributions made to the shaping of the modern world by those who laboured under duress.' Howard Temperley, Times Literary Supplement 'A well researched and skillfully written book ... This work makes a significant contribution to the study of servitude. The depth to which Bush plumbs his subject exceeds most works. It can serve as an introductory work to the subject for interested readers, but it can also be profitably mined by professional historians, sociologists, psychologists and college students.' HistoryTable of ContentsPreface. Part I: The Forms of Legal Bondage:. 1. Servitude Comparatively Considered. 2. Modern Slavery. 3. Modern Serfdom. 4. Indentured Service. 5. Debt Bondage. 6. Penal Servitude. Part II: Emergence and Development:. 7. White Servitude in the Americas. 8. New World Slavery. 9. European Serfdom. 10. Islamic Slavery. Part III: Emancipation and After:. 11. Abolition in Europe and the Americas. 12. The Survival of Servitude. Conclusion: The Significance of Modern Servitude. A Bibliography Essay. Notes. Index.

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John Wiley and Sons Ltd Servitude in Modern Times

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Book SynopsisThis book offers a comparative analysis of the major systems of servitude present in the world since 1500. Slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, indentured service and convict labour all provided labour and service through the legal subjection of one person to another, but remained very different.Trade Review'Servitude in Modern Times explores and explains the great variety of unfree labour systems that have flourished in one or another part of the world under the influence of the rise of capitalism. The book's scope is exemplary, covering serfdom and debt bondage as well as chattel slavery, and ranging from Europe and the Americas to Africa and the Islamic world. The world of unfree labour and the movements of emancipation usually constitute two separate realms of study; here they are most fruitfully brought together. While condemning the essential cruelty of servitude, M. L. Bush conveys a historical understanding of systems of oppression that were regarded as perfectly civilized until very recently, and new forms of which survive into the present.' Robin Blackburn, University of Essex 'The author takes as his subject practically every form of labour, apart from freewage labour, that has existed between the sixteenth century and the present. His concern, however, is less with the persistence of archaic institutions than with the emergence of new commercially driven forms of bondage, among them the slave empires of the new World and the so-called new serfdom of Eastern Europe. Far from being a relic left over from earlier times, servitude is shown as playing a key role in the shaping of the modern world. The evidence for this is so overwhelming that one wonders why it has so frequently been overlooked...As a historian hitherto principally concerned with European social stratification, Bush has no time for handwringing over the injustices of the past, preferring to emphasize the positive contributions made to the shaping of the modern world by those who laboured under duress.' Howard Temperley, Times Literary Supplement 'A well researched and skillfully written book ... This work makes a significant contribution to the study of servitude. The depth to which Bush plumbs his subject exceeds most works. It can serve as an introductory work to the subject for interested readers, but it can also be profitably mined by professional historians, sociologists, psychologists and college students.' HistoryTable of ContentsPreface. Part I: The Forms of Legal Bondage:. 1. Servitude Comparatively Considered. 2. Modern Slavery. 3. Modern Serfdom. 4. Indentured Service. 5. Debt Bondage. 6. Penal Servitude. Part II: Emergence and Development:. 7. White Servitude in the Americas. 8. New World Slavery. 9. European Serfdom. 10. Islamic Slavery. Part III: Emancipation and After:. 11. Abolition in Europe and the Americas. 12. The Survival of Servitude. Conclusion: The Significance of Modern Servitude. A Bibliography Essay. Notes. Index.

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Book SynopsisIn one of his most important books, the renowned historian Eugene D. Genovese examines slave revolts in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil, placing them in the context of modern world history.

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LSU Press Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augustas Hinterlands

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Book SynopsisIn this study of the communities on both sides of the Savannah River in Georgia and South Carolina, J. William Harris explores two great ironies of American history, the South's commitment to a liberty supported by slavery and its attempt to maintain the status quo with a war that undermined southern society.

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£18.95

Louisiana State University Press Revolutionary Emancipation Slavery and

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Book SynopsisSkillfully weaving an African worldview into the conventional historiography of British abolitionism, Claudius Fergus presents new insights into one of the most intriguing and momentous episodes of Atlantic history.

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LSU Press The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery

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Book SynopsisOffers a new interpretation of the Garrisonian abolitionists, stressing their deep ties to reformers and liberal thinkers in Great Britain and Europe. The group of American reformers known as “Garrisonians” included, at various times, some of the most significant and familiar figures in the history of the antebellum struggle over slavery.

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Louisiana State University Press Slave against Slave

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Book SynopsisIn the first-ever comprehensive analysis of violence between slaves in the antebellum South, Jeff Forret challenges persistent notions of slave communities as sites of unwavering harmony and solidarity.

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