Volume 31, Number 3 · March 1, 1984
The Hidden History of Emancipation
By Eric Foner
Trial by Fire: A People's History of the Civil War and Reconstruction
by Page Smith
McGraw-Hill, 1,038 pp., $29.95
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867 Series II: The Black Military Experience
edited by Ira Berlin, with Joseph P. Reidy, by Leslie S. Rowland
Cambridge University Press, 852 pp., $37.50
Among the revolutionary events that transformed the nineteenth-century world, none was so dramatic in its human consequences as the abolition of chattel slavery. Slavery and emancipation have always been central questions for American historians and much of the best historical work of the 1960s and 1970s concentrated on the South's 'peculiar institution.' More recently, attention has tended to shift from slavery and the causes of the Civil War to the effects of abolition and the events of the post-Civil War period. In part, this simply reflects the need for a breathing space to assimilate the remarkable studies of slavery during the past two decades. But it is also inspired by a recognition that, in many ways, American society has not yet fully accepted the consequences of the emancipation.
Review, 3672 words
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