A must read for students, but also a good read for the general history enthusiast.

Ira Berlin in "Many Thousands Gone" has made a very important contribution to the growing literature attempting to understand both the big picture and the daily details of slavery. As his subtitle suggests, his work focuses on the first two centuries of slavery in North America.

Berlin's primary (and well-documented) thesis is that slave culture was not one monolithic culture, but several different cultures depending upon the era and the area of North American enslavement. Additionally, Berlin highlights that slavery was racist and classist, an interpretation which does not minimize the evils of racism, but also exposes the evils of classism.

Though in other works by the same author, readers find first-hand accounts of the horrors of slavery in the words of the enslaved, such documentation is less evident in this work. An increase in such documentation would have strengthened the already excellent "Many Thousand Gone." Still, the overall message and "feel" of "Many Thousands Gone" does accurately and powerfully depict the agony and inhumanity of African American slavery.

Berlin engages the important issue of the slave's choice of or refusal to choose the master's religion. Including a small sampling of the slave narratives (the majority of which evidence acceptance of Christianity) and the myriad slave conversion accounts, would have provided added depth to this fine book. Converting slaves, by their own accounts, did not see themselves as converting to their masters' religion. Instead, they saw themselves rejecting their masters' hypocritical distortion of Christianity and receiving Christ and Christianity, cleansed of lies and replete with the message of eternal freedom spirituality and internal freedom in Christ.

For the broad panorama of early enslavement, look no further than "Many Thousands Gone."

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of "Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction," "Soul Physicians," and "Spiritual Friends."

Ira Berlin in "Many Thousands Gone" has made a very important contribution to the growing literature attempting to understand both the big picture and the daily details of slavery. As his subtitle suggests, his work focuses on the first two centuries of slavery in North America.

Berlin's primary (and well-documented) thesis is that slave culture was not one monolithic culture, but several different cultures depending upon the era and the area of North American enslavement. Additionally, Berlin highlights that slavery was racist and classist, an interpretation which does not minimize the evils of racism, but also exposes the evils of classism.

Though in other works by the same author, readers find first-hand accounts of the horrors of slavery in the words of the enslaved, such documentation is less evident in this work. An increase in such documentation would have strengthened the already excellent "Many Thousand Gone." Still, the overall message and "feel" of "Many Thousands Gone" does accurately and powerfully depict the agony and inhumanity of African American slavery.

Berlin engages the important issue of the slave's choice of or refusal to choose the master's religion. Including a small sampling of the slave narratives (the majority of which evidence acceptance of Christianity) and the myriad slave conversion accounts, would have provided added depth to the book.

Converting slaves, by their own accounts, did not see themselves as converting to their masters' religion. Instead, they saw themselves rejecting their masters' hypocritical distortion of Christianity and receiving Christ and Christianity, cleansed of lies and replete with the message of eternal freedom spirituality and internal freedom in Christ.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of "Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction," "Soul Physicians," and "Spiritual Friends."

Ira Berlin in "Many Thousands Gone" has made an important contribution to the growing literature attempting to understand both the big picture and the daily details of slavery. As his subtitle suggests, his work focuses on the first two centuries of slavery in North America.

Berlin's primary thesis is that slave culture was not one monolithic culture, but several different cultures depending upon the era and the area of North American enslavement. Additionally, Berlin highlights that slavery was racist and classist, an interpretation which does not minimize the evils of racism, but also exposes the evils of classism.

Though in other works by the same author, readers find first-hand accounts of the horrors of slavery in the words of the enslaved, such documentation is less evident in this work. An increase in such documentation would have strengthened "Many Thousand Gone."

Additionally, Berlin engages the issue of the slave's choice of or refusal to choose the master's religion. Once again, including even a small sampling of the slave narratives (the vast, vast majority of which evidence acceptance of Christianity) and the myriad slave conversion accounts, would have added to the book. In particular, converting slaves did not at all see themselves as converting to their masters religion. Instead, they saw themselves rejecting their masters' hypocritical distortion of Christianity and receiving Christ and Christianity, cleansed of lies and replete with the message of eternal freedom spirituality and internal freedom in Christ.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of "Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction."

From my reading of Ira Berlin's work, one thing is apparent: Ira Berlin is a closet KKK member (maybe leader). Throughout his writing he minimizes the evils of slavery and emphasizes what few freedoms slaves enjoyed. He describes his academic style as more "nuanced" than the style of previous works on slavery in America. What he means by this is that he goes into minute detail about how at different times and in different places, slavery was more or less oppressive. All of that is obvious to anyone, because it occurs in every oppressive structure throughout history, but Berlin's tight focus on this detail makes one almost forget how horrid the institution was at all times, everywhere it was practiced.

Rather than write about the true history of slavery from the slave's perspective - the history of resistance and struggle to the death, Berlin describes slavery as being "negotiated" between slave and master, as if they were haggling over the price of a bagel. He consistently uses toned-down language to obscure the reality of what slavery was. He says that we cannot understand someone just by knowing that they were a slave - we cannot lump all slaves together. But what greater information can we know about someone than that their entire life revolves around the struggle to free him or herself of the whip of their master? Does it truly help us to nuance that understanding by knowing that at times, some lucky slaves were allowed to go to church, or to take breaks from work, or to get only 20 lashes instead of 50?

Unfortunately for history students, Berlin has become widely respected among many historians, which just goes to show how deeply racist America continues to be.

Brought for college class. Arrived in excellent condition. Purchased new book at great price. Better then campus store prices.

The myth of slavery derives from the powerful images of the miniseries Roots; the notion that black people were simply swept out of their African lives, degraded and sometimes killed on the harsh way to America and then put to work on a cotton plantation without power of any sort.

Ira Berlin, in this beautifully written and thoroughly researched history of the first two hundred years of American slavery, "Many Thousands Gone", blows apart that myth. He says that slavery had great variety, based on geographic, economic and generational factors. The first generation of slaves in America were creoles, born of white and African American parents. They frequently lived along the sea and interacted with people of all walks of life, were traders and often spoke multiple languages. These slaves frequently stayed with their families, knew and utilized the courts to petition for freedom, they worked with their slave-owners to grow crops and to negotiate payment for their eventual freedom. This changed with subsequent generations who were plucked from central Africa and did not have the same experience with the white world. While slaves in these subsequent generations lost the power to negotiate the terms of their slavery with their slaveholders, they were able to grab autonomy in other ways. They grew and sold goods in cities, they purchased their freedom, though often at a high price. They escaped and formed maroon armed communities.

A few other factors also played a significant role in determining the virulence of slavery, specifically geography and economics. Some crops like cotton and tobacco were well suited to the plantation systems and in areas where those crops grew well, the slave system was particularly harsh. History was another factor. In the form of the American Revolution it disrupted the plantation system, because the plantation owners, who were often patriots with strong beliefs in the rights of man, also owned slaves and defended their right to do so. The loyalists took advantage of this dilemma and often had the plantation slaves fighting on the loyalist side in exchange for the promise of becoming free men. Sometimes they even delivered on that promise.

My only criticism is that I wanted more of a narrative that would bring together the various aspects of slavery. I was left with the feeling that American slavery was really Mississippi slavery or South Carolina slavery or New York slavery. The legacy of slavery appears to be monolithic even if the experience of slavery was not.

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!