| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste. By Mark S. Weiner. (New York: Knopf, 2004. xviii, 421 pp. $26.95, ISBN 0-375-40981-5.)
Lawrence Stone and Simon Schama have a lot to answer for. Narrative history and good writing are of course to be welcomed. Sometimes, though, narrative history is uncomfortably merged with, or layered on, theory-driven history, and—even worse—sometimes authors take the wrong models for good writing style.	1
Black Trials illustrates some of the problems with a certain kind of narrative history. Because much of what follows is critical, I should be clear at the outset that Black Trials provides a valuable account of the development of Afro-Americans' place in American civil and political society. The account emerges in its full force, though, only after one strips away Mark S. Weiner's overt theorizing and gets over some irritation at his version of literariness (including Schama's innovation, the interjection of imagined events into historical narratives).	. . .

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