The Long Emancipation
The Demise of Slavery in the United States
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- £16.99
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- £16.99
Publisher Description
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of Maryland historian Berlin (Many Thousands Gone) has studied American slavery from its origins through its demise, and in this short, tightly constructed monograph he focuses on the latter process, which after a century and a half "remains very much alive among us and about us." The work, based on his 2014 Nathan I. Huggins lectures in African-American history at Harvard, centers on whether emancipation came as the result of centuries of liberation struggles on the part of the enslaved, or if it was the gift of "constituted authority" on the part of Abraham Lincoln. That debate maps onto the wider issue of whether the majority of slaves were in constant, if often secret, forms of resistance to their bondage, or whether they accommodated themselves to their plight and hoped simply to ameliorate their situation. In Berlin's view, "the demise of slavery was not so much a proclamation as a movement" that played out in various ways across the plantation societies of the Atlantic. All were characterized by black resistance, violent struggle, and a stated desire for freedom and citizenship. Writing for a general audience, Berlin lucidly illuminates the "near-century-long" process of abolition and how, in many ways, the work of emancipation continues today.
