Bøker av Ira Berlin

Ira Berlin offers a framework for understanding slavery's demise in the United States. Emancipation was not an occasion but a century-long process of brutal struggle by generations of African Americans who were not naive about the price of freedom. Just as slavery was initiated and maintained by violence, undoing slavery also required violence.

Three essays present an introduction and history of the emancipation of the slaves during the Civil War by tracing the destruction of slavery, examining the evolution of freedom, and finally demonstrating how the war itself was transformed into a struggle for universal liberty.

When nearly 200,000 black men, mostly former slaves, entered the Civil War, they transformed it into a struggle for liberty and changed the course of American history. Freedom's Soldiers tells those men's story in their words and those of eyewitnesses. These letters, affidavits, and memorials reveal the variety and complexity of the African-American experience during the era of emancipation.

A leading historian of southern and African-American life traces the evolution of black society in America from its creation in the early 17th century through the American Revolution. Berlin reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king.

Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the U.S. from its beginnings in the 17th century to its fiery demise nearly 300 years later. He offers a major reinterpretation in which slavery was made and remade by successive generations of Africans and African Americans.