Slavery In New York

Description

The recent discovery of the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan reminded Americans that slavery in the United States was not merely a phenomenon of the antebelium South. In fact, for most of its history - fully two centuries - New York was a slave city. For a good proportion of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was the largest slave city on the continent. Edited by Ira Berlin, the Bancroft Prize-winning author of Many Thousands Gone, and Leslie Harris, this ground-breaking work brings together twelve new contributions by leading historians of slavery.

Ira Berlin is the author of Generations of Captivity, Many Thousands Gone (winner of the Bancroft Prize) Remembering Slavery, and Slaves Without Masters. He is Distinguished University Professor of history at the University of Maryland. Leslie Harris teaches history at Emory University and is the author of in the Shadow of Slavery.

"[Berlin's] Many Thousands Gone is likely to remain for years to come the standard account of the first two centuries of slavery in the area that became the United States." - London Review of Books; "Berlin has given us a moving, insightful account of slavery in the United States. Readers will not soon forget the story he has told, nor should they." - New York Times; "Berlin's study is the best account we have of the beginnings of servitude in America." - Times Literary Supplement; "[Harris's] in the Shadow of Slavery... is a big and ambitious book, one in which insights about race and class in New York City abound. Leslie Harris has masterfully brought more than two centuries of African American history back to life in this illuminating new work; - David Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness; "Berlin, one of the foremost historians of American slavery, has written an addition to the canon of essential works on the subject." - Christian Science Monitor"