Ira Berlin was Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.
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.
*New York Times Book Review*
The cause of the end of slavery in the U.S. is a long, complex
story that is usually, in the general reading public’s mind,
simplified by ‘the Civil War ended it.’ In this remarkably cogent,
impressively thought-out, and even beautifully styled account by a
university historian, we are given emphatic witness to his
long-held professional conviction that ‘freedom’s arrival,’ as he
phrases it, was not due to a ‘moment or a man’ but because of a
process that took a century to unfold.
*Booklist (starred review)*
A short, fast-paced interpretive history of the transition of
African Americans from chattels to free persons. [Berlin]
challenges previous scholars who identify both a ‘moment’ and a
human factor that sparked emancipation—generally either President
Abraham Lincoln or the South’s slaves—for initiating slavery’s
overthrow. Instead, Berlin takes the long view in charting
emancipation’s circuitous metamorphosis, from the late 18th century
until the 1860s… In the end, Berlin credits black persons, north
and south, for gradually but forcefully removing slavery’s stain
from the fabric of American life.
*Choice*
Berlin lucidly illuminates the ‘near-century-long’ process of
abolition and how, in many ways, the work of emancipation continues
today.
*Publishers Weekly*
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