American Slavery: 1619-1877 (10th Anniversary Edition) - Softcover

Kolchin, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809016303 ISBN 13: 9780809016303

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 2003

Synopsis

The single best short survey in America, now updated.
Includes a New Preface and Afterward

In terms of accessibility and comprehensive coverage, Kolchin's American Slavery is a singularly important achievement. Now updated to address a decade of new scholarship, the book includes a new preface, afterword, and revised and expanded bibliographic essay. It remains the best book to introduce a subject of profound and lasting importance, one that lies at the center of American history.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Kolchin, the Henry Clay Reed Professor of History at the University of Delaware, is the author of numerous books, most recently A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth Century South in Comparative Perspective (2003).

From Kirkus Reviews:

In a lively interpretive history, Kolchin (History/Univ. of Delaware) succinctly traces America's institution of slavery from its Colonial beginnings to the Reconstruction era. American slavery, Kolchin explains, didn't develop in isolation but evolved as part of a trend toward forced labor in the New World colonies, especially in the Caribbean and Brazil. In Colonial America, ``the initial demand for labor was precisely that--for labor--and was largely color-blind.'' Most forced laborers were indentured servants from Great Britain; although some slavery existed as early as the founding, in the early 17th century, of the Virginia colony, not until that century's close were Africans imported in large numbers as slaves. Kolchin reveals that, while the plantation slavery of what was to become the South developed distinctively (and primarily to cultivate tobacco and cotton), it had much in common with the plantation slavery of the Caribbean (where sugar was the primary crop). By about 1770, American slavery was concentrated mostly in the South, though it existed in all of the American colonies, and, as time passed, relationships between slaves and masters changed as second- generation slaves lost much of their African culture and became Americanized. In the US--in contrast to the Caribbean--slaves lived longer, developed considerable occupational diversity, and became acculturated, particularly in their absorption of Protestantism. The Revolutionary era saw slavery threatened by Enlightenment ideology, but the institution survived more strongly than ever in the South and, during the 19th century, came to be perceived as fundamental to the Southern economy and way of life. Kolchin writes about slave life through the Civil War, and, not surprisingly, he sees slavery as leaving a legacy that has persisted throughout our own century. A clear and briskly written survey that puts slavery in context and explains its continuing impact on American life. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0809016303
• ISBN 13: 9780809016303
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352