| 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

Stories of Freedom in Black New York. By Shane White. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. 260 pp. $27.95, ISBN 0-674-00893-6.)

In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863. By Leslie M. Harris. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xii, 380 pp. $42.50, ISBN 0-226-31774-9.)

It is commonplace for reviewers of books centered on the black experience in the North to welcome those contributions that are said to redress the long-standing imbalance of historical attention given to bondage and emancipation in the South. This conclusion was misleading when offered a generation ago, by which time Lorenzo Greene, John Daniels, Dixon Ryan Fox, Louis Ruchames, August Meier, Theodore Hershberg, Gary Nash, Leon Litwack, and many others had published pioneering studies centered on bondage, emancipation, and community formation in the North before the Civil War.

Inspired by the new direction of historical studies since the 1970s with its emphasis on writing history from "the bottom up," scholars then in training "discovered," as the late Nathan Huggins put it, that there was far more extant black history than we had been led to believe. Summarizing what had been achieved in a brief fifteen years as a result of the new direction called for by the new social history, John Blassingame and Mary Frances Berry, in their survey, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (1982), drew attention to the "massive written record" left by free blacks. This cornucopia of black experience could be found in autobiographies, newspapers, speeches, sermons, pamphlets, journals, letters, and even a few novels, poems, plays, and short stories. Not mentioned, but equally revealing, was the large body of documents, both private and official, produced by whites and blacks, including reports by keepers of eleemosynary institutions and prisons, and a wide variety of public documents, including reports on the census, vital statistics, education, political activity, and crime.

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