Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

Ira Berlin was the recipient of the 1999 Bancroft Prize from Columbia University

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America is the 1999 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention, Sponsored by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America is the winner of the 1999 Elliott Rudwick Prize of the Organization of American Historians

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America is the winner of the 1999 Frederick Douglass Prize for the Best Book on Slavery Sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University


Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America is the winner, of the Association of American Publishers 1998 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Award in the Category of History

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America is the finalist, 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and co-Winner of the Southern Historical Association's Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award for 1999
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America is also the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Prize

                                           Ira Berlin on Slave Culture on Youtube

In America, black and white can identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. In book Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century to the American Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reinterprets slaves into the history of the American society.

                                           Ira Berlin on Teaching About Slavery

Slaves are labor force on tobacco and rice plantations, they worked as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier when they arrived in North America. Society with slaves stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms of slave labor force. African Americans encountered the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves, which gave way to the plantation generations.

Ira Berlin tells us that the slaves' labor was changing place to place and time to time. Also, the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society was also changing all the time.  Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the American history went on .

Ira Berlin is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Other HUP Books by Ira Berlin is Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves