When nearly 200,000 black men, most of them former slaves, entered the Union army and navy, they transformed the Civil War into a struggle for liberty and changed the course of American history. Freedom's Soldiers tells the story of those men in their own words and the words of other eyewitnesses. These moving letters, affidavits, and memorials--drawn from the records of the National Archives--reveal the variety and complexity of the African-American experience during the era of emancipation.
When nearly 200,000 black men, most of them former slaves, entered the Union army and navy, they transformed the Civil War into a struggle for liberty...
An award-winning historian's sweeping new interpretation of the African American experience.
In this masterful account, Ira Berlin, one of the nation's most distinguished historians, offers a revolutionary-and sure to be controversial-new view of African American history. In The Making of African America, Berlin challenges the traditional presentation of a linear, progressive history from slavery to freedom. Instead, he puts forth the idea that four great migrations, between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries, lie at the heart of black American culture and its...
An award-winning historian's sweeping new interpretation of the African American experience.
As slavery collapsed during the American Civil War, former slaves struggled to secure their liberty, reconstitute their families, and create the institutions befitting a free people. This volume of Freedom presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in different settings in the Upper South. At first, most federal officials hoped to mobilize former slaves without either transforming the conflict into a war of liberation or assuming responsibility for the young, the old, or others not suitable for military employment. But as the Union army came to depend on black...
As slavery collapsed during the American Civil War, former slaves struggled to secure their liberty, reconstitute their families, and create the insti...
Union occupation of parts of the Confederacy during the Civil War forced federal officials to confront questions about the social order that would replace slavery. This volume of Freedom presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in the large plantation areas of the Union-occupied Lower South. The documents illustrate the experiences of former slaves as military laborers, as residents of federally sponsored "contraband camps," as wage laborers on plantations and in towns, and in some instances, as independent farmers and self-employed workers. Together with the...
Union occupation of parts of the Confederacy during the Civil War forced federal officials to confront questions about the social order that would rep...
When it was first published fifteen years ago, this startling--and bestselling--first-person history of slavery was heralded as "powerful and intense" (Atlanta Journal Constitution) and "invaluable" (Chicago Tribune). Drawing from the thousands of interviews conducted with ex-slaves in the 1930s by researchers working with the Federal Writers' Project, this astonishing collection makes available the only known recordings of people who lived through the enormity of slavery. The groundbreaking interviews with former slaves collected in the original book-and-audio set of...
When it was first published fifteen years ago, this startling--and bestselling--first-person history of slavery was heralded as "powerful and intense"...
