Reviews of Books

This fine collection of essays should be required reading for all graduate students in American history and anyone else who needs to catch up on the important connections between labor history and African-American history that Graham Russell Hodges and a handful of other historians of the early North have been making during the past decade or so. The author of numerous books, including New York City Cartmen, 1667–1850 (New York, 1986) and Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665–1865 (Madison, 1997), Hodges offers ten wide-ranging and accessible essays on race, ethnicity, labor, gender, and urban history in this compact volume. All of the essays have been published elsewhere between 1988 and 1997, four as review essays, three in book collections, two as articles in the Journal of Urban History, and one (now significantly revised) as a pamphlet for the Bergen County (N. J.) Historical Society.	1
This fact should in no way deter readers. Slavery, Freedom, and Culture is a stunning book precisely because the essays cohere so well. Hodges is intimately acquainted with the unique world of African Americans as bound and free laborers and as political actors in northern New Jersey and New York City from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. Several of his essays, steeped in careful archival research, highlight the important continuities and discontinuities of black life and work in the urban Northeast over two hundred years, themes explored more fully in his other books. The review essays reflect this expertise and at the same time feature those historians whose recent work explores African Americans' resistance and details their "republicanization" in different kinds of places, whether in urban Virginia, the lowcountry South, or the Caribbean. Although the author elected to arrange these essays chronologically, one can also read the collection, once one shuffles around the order a bit, as an investigation into his intellectual journey over the past fifteen years. Hodges used a succession of ideological and conceptual frameworks to shape and reshape his understanding of the African-American experience. This development of ideas is reflected in the questions he poses in the reviews, the topics he tackles, and the conclusions he reaches.	2
As a whole, the earlier essays make clear that the history of African Americans and slavery cannot be separated from the social history of the American Revolution and the creation of a working-class identity in succeeding decades. In a piece on the New York City Freemanship Law and a retrospective on Richard B. Morris's Government and Labor in Early America (New York, 1946), Hodges makes a compelling case for paying closer attention to the historic relationship between labor and government. Both the Freemanship Law and government regulation of trades in eighteenth-century New York created a patronage system on which many white workers still relied decades later for status and identity, even as the legacy of the American Revolution forced its dismantlement.	. . .