Ira Berlin

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...

This book sketches the complex evolution of slavery and black society from the first arrivals in the early 1600s through the American Revolution. Many 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....

Includes live recordings of interviews with former slaves conducted in the 1930s by researchers working with the Federal Writers' Project and dramatic readings from written interviews collected at that time.