Abstract
This book appears in an African American history series aimed at non-specialists and dedicated to bridging popular and academic history. The meat of the book (pp. 31–124) examines black history from 1770 to 1831, emphasizing the black men and black women who resisted and criticized slavery. Documents (pp. 125–169), with the most recent, by President Barack Obama, dating from 2008, constitute examples. The thrust of Edward Countryman's argument is that while new ways of thinking shared by blacks and whites during the years of the American Revolution undermined slavery, the U.S. Constitution and the astonishing expansion of cotton cultivation in the early republic fortified the slave system. The revolution, understood as stretching to 1831, was both antislavery and proslavery, leaving a paradoxical legacy that would be faced in the Civil War. Two views of the book are necessary: one is of its likely use in college history courses and the other is of its goal, set by author and publisher, to serve as a union of popular and academic history.
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