Perhaps no event in American history arouses more impassioned debate than the abolition of slavery. Answers to basic questions about who ended slavery, how, and why remain fiercely contested more than a century and a half after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In The Long Emancipation, Ira Berlin draws upon decades of study to offer a framework for understanding slaveryโs demise in the United States. Freedom was not achieved in a moment, and emancipation was not an occasion but a near-century-long processโa shifting but persistent struggle that involved thousands of men and women.
โIra Berlin ranks as one of the greatest living historians of slavery in the United States... The Long Emancipation offers a useful reminder that abolition was not the charitable work of respectable white people, or not mainly that. Instead, the demise of slavery was made possible by the constant discomfort inflicted on middle-class white society by black activists. And like the participants in todayโs Black Lives Matter movement, Berlin has not forgotten that the history of slavery in the United Statesโespecially the history of how slavery endedโis never far away when contemporary Americans debate whether their nation needs to change.โ
โEdward E. Baptist, New York Times Book Review