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.

When it was first published fifteen years ago, this startling--and bestselling--first-person history of slavery was heralded as "powerful and intense" ("Atlanta Journal Constitution") and "invaluable" ("Chicago Tribune"). Drawing from the thousands of interviews conducted with ex-slaves in the 1930s by researchers working with the Federal Writers' Project, this astonishing collection makes available the only known recordings of people who lived through the enormity of slavery. The groundbreaking interviews with former slaves collected in the original book-and-audio set of "Remembering Slavery" are now available for a new generation of readers and listeners in both affordable paperback and enhanced audio e-book.

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

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, first published in 1991, 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.

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, first published in 1993, 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 upon black workers and as the number of destitute freed people 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.

When nearly 200,000 black men, most of them former slaves, entered the Union army and navy, they transformed the Civil War into a struggle for liberty and changed the course of American history. Freedom's Soldiers tells the story of those men in their own words and the words of other eyewitnesses. These moving letters, affidavits, and memorials - drawn from the records of the National Archives - reveal the variety and complexity of the African-American experience during the era of emancipation.

When nearly 200,000 black men, most of them former slaves, entered the Union army and navy, they transformed the Civil War into a struggle for liberty and changed the course of American history. Freedom's Soldiers tells the story of those men in their own words and the words of other eyewitnesses. These moving letters, affidavits, and memorials--drawn from the records of the National Archives--reveal the variety and complexity of the African-American experience during the era of emancipation.

The three essays in this volume present an introduction to history of the emancipation of the slaves during the Civil War. The first essay traces the destruction of slavery by discussing the shift from a war for the Union to a war against slavery. The slaves are shown to have shaped the destiny of the nation through their determination to place their liberty on the wartime agenda. The second essay examines the evolution of freedom in occupied areas of the lower and upper South. The struggle of those freed to obtain economic independence in difficult wartime circumstances indicates conflicting conceptions of freedom among former slaves and slaveholders, Northern soldiers and civilians. The third essay demonstrates how the enlistment and military service of nearly 200,000 slaves hastened the transformation of the war into a struggle for universal liberty, and how this experience shaped the lives of former slaves long after the war had ended.

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.

Berlin uses letters, personal testimonies, official transcripts and other records to unravel the history of emancipation, explaining how people with little power and few weapons secured freedom. Vividly demonstrating how emancipation transformed the lives of both black and white people, this volume represents a collection of some of the most remarkable correspondence ever written. Edited by legendary author Ira Berlin.

Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia considers the cultural, political, and religious contexts shaping the long struggle against racial injustice in one of early America's most important cities. Comprised of nine scholarly essays by a distinguished group of historians, the volume recounts the antislavery movement in Philadelphia from its marginalized status during the colonial era to its rise during the Civil War.

Philadelphia was the home to the Society of Friends, which offered the first public attack on slavery in the 1680s; the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the western world's first antislavery group; and to generations of abolitionists who organized some of early America's most important civil rights groups.

These abolitionists -- black, white, religious, secular, male, female -- grappled with the meaning of black freedom earlier and more consistently than anyone else in early American culture. Cutting-edge academic views illustrate Philadelphia's antislavery movement, how it survived societal opposition, and how it remained vital to evolving notions of racial justice.

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.

Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through 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 our nation. Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves-who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites-gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil. As the nature of the slaves' labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.

So central was labor in the lives of African-American slaves that it has often been taken for granted, with little attention given to the type of work that slaves did and the circumstances surrounding it. Cultivation and Culture brings together leading scholars of slavery - historians, anthropologists, and sociologists - to explore when, where, and how slaves labored in growing the New World's great staples and how this work shaped the institution of slavery and the lives of African-American slaves. Selected from a conference on comparative slavery at the University of Maryland that set the agenda for the next decades' research in this field, the essays focus on the inter-relationship between the demands of particular crops, the organisation of labour, the nature of the labour force and the character of agricultural technology. They reveal the full complexity of the institution of chattel bondage in the New World and suggest why and how slavery varied from place to place and time to time. What these scholars show is that although work in the slave owners' fields accounted for most of the slaves' labouring time, slaves also worked for themselves and their independent economic activities had far reaching consequences. By producing food for themselves and others, tending cash crops, raising livestock, manufacturing finished goods, marketing their own products, consuming and saving the proceeds, and bequething property to their descendents, slaves took control of a large part of their lives. In many ways their independent economic endeavours offered a foundation for their domestic and commuity life, determining the social structure of slave society and providing a material basis for their distinctive culture. In exploring both the work that slaves performed for their owners and the work they did for themselves, Cultivation and Culture sheds new light on the origins and development of African-American culture and provides a new understanding of the African-American experience in slavery.

Finally available in paperback, "Power and Culture" is the last work by America's most influential labor and social historian, the late Herbert Gutman. Edited and introduced by Gutman's colleague Ira Berlin, the book includes original, unpublished essays from throughout Gutman's career and important but unavailable works from journals and periodicals, as well as an extended interview with Gutman and a comprehensive bibliography of his works.

"Power and Culture" features essays on the lives of workers and the formation of class during the "Gilded Age" of American corporations, and on the lives of African American slaves and freedmen--the studies for which Gutman became famous. But it also shows the range of his thought on such subjects as "Roots "and popular historical awareness. With Berlin's critical and biographical introduction, "Power and Culture" is an important reappraisal of a major scholar.

Widely recognized as "one of the nation's foremost scholars on the slave era" ("Boston Globe"), Bancroft Prize-winning historian Ira Berlin has changed the way we think about African American life in slavery and freedom. This classic volume, now available in a handsome new edition, is an indispensable resource for educators and general readers alike.
First published to great acclaim in 1974, "Slaves Without Masters" established Berlin in his field and went on to win the National History Society's Best First Book Prize. It tells the moving story of the quarter of a million free black men and women who lived in the South before the Civil War, portraying "with careful scholarship, acute analysis, and admirable historical imagination" ("The New Republic") their struggle for community, economic independence, and education within an oppressive society.

An award-winning historian's sweeping new interpretation of the African American experience.
In this masterful account, Ira Berlin, one of the nation's most distinguished historians, offers a revolutionary-and sure to be controversial-new view of African American history. In "The Making of African America," Berlin challenges the traditional presentation of a linear, progressive history from slavery to freedom. Instead, he puts forth the idea that four great migrations, between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries, lie at the heart of black American culture and its development. With an engrossing, accessible narrative, Berlin traces the transit from Africa to America, Virginia to Alabama, Biloxi to Chicago, Lagos to the Bronx, and in the process finds the essence of black American life.

The official movie tie-in edition to the winner of the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, and Lupita Nyong'o, and directed by Steve McQueen New York Times bestseller "I could not believe that I had never heard of this book. It felt as important as Anne Frank's Diary, only published nearly a hundred years before. . . . The book blew [my] mind: the epic range, the details, the adventure, the horror, and the humanity. . . . I hope my film can play a part in drawing attention to this important book of courage. Solomon's bravery and life deserve nothing less." -Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, from the Foreword Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life. It became an immediate bestseller and today is recognized for its unusual insight and eloquence as one of the very few portraits of American slavery produced by someone as educated as Solomon Northup, or by someone with the dual perspective of having been both a free man and a slave.