Books by 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.

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.