Volume 45, Number 19 · December 3, 1998
The Big American Crime
By Edmund S. Morgan
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
by Ira Berlin
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 497 pp., $29.95
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
by Philip D. Morgan
University of North Carolina Press, 736 pp., $21.95 (paper)
Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation
a book and audiotape set, translated by Ira Berlin, by Marc Favreau, by Steven F. Miller
The New Press, 416, with two 60-minute cassettes pp., $49.95
Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery
produced by WGBH
4 videocassettes, 90 minutes each pp., $59.95
Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery
by Charles Johnson, by Patricia Smith. the WGBH Research Team
Harcourt Brace, 494 pp., $30.00
It has been a long time since anyone has argued that slavery was a good thing, but just how bad it was has become a pregnant question. It is not in doubt that slaves suffered injustice and cruelty, that slave plantations, whether producing rice or tobacco, cotton or sugar, rested on systematic brutality and violence. The question is what the experience did to the people violated, especially in North America, where they were almost all black, the ancestors of present-day black Americans. Or should we say of African-Americans? The choice of a name is itself a way of taking sides, like the older one between Negro and black (or Black?), a choice between stressing national unity or ethnic diversity, between affirming racial equality or black pride. Historical investiga-tion of what slavery did to slaves is charged with presentist implications that shadow every fact found, and consciously or unconsciously shape every interpretation.
Review, 6394 words
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