| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. By Ira Berlin. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 374 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01061-2.)

It is richly satisfying to read these synthetic reflections of the dean of historians of slavery and freedom in North America. Ira Berlin here breaks through the conventionally static framework of scholarship on "slavery" to achieve a beautifully integrated version of the historicization of the lives of the enslaved toward which he, Peter Kolchin, Philip Morgan, Walter Johnson, and other leaders in the field have been straining for two decades. Generations of Captivity—building from his celebrated Many Thousands Gone (1998)—very readably compresses a nuanced differentiation of the experiences of the enslaved by region and over time, from his worldly "Charter Generations" of "Atlantic creoles" through "Plantation Generations" subjected to the isolating rigors of rice and tobacco cultivation to the "Revolutionary Generations" who glimpsed the promise of freedom. This reprise includes Berlin's distinctive, and entirely due, attention to the North as an integral "part of a slaveholding republic" (p. 233) and the special qualities of life under slavery in the French and Spanish lower Mississippi Valley.

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