But what gives the book an additional dimension is its deftly employed social insights. Despite its huge span of time and space, it is a. The economic and historical research presented here is impressive. Many Thousands Gone covers the 200 years following the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia in 1619. Although the prose is serviceable more than anything else, the book holds many surprises gleaned from the facts, whether in its portrait of New York as a major slave city or its descriptions of free enterprise at work among slaves. These distinctions have continuing resonance, as Berlin shows that once a society with slaves became a slave society, all blacks-free or not-could come to be regarded as slaves: in short, how an economic system became racism. He shows how slavery was different for those born in the West Indies, Africa and North America, and for those serving in urban settings (which encouraged a certain entrepreneurial spirit) and in rural. He makes a great distinction, for example, between slave societies such as the Carolina low country in the 17th century (in which both the economy and the social structure was built upon slavery) and societies with slaves (the lower Mississippi of the same era) where slavery was only part of a more complex structure.

Berlin, a history professor at the University of Maryland, shows how at different times and at different places, slavery was a very different thing. OctoMany Thousands Gone Telephone lines were open so that audience members could talk to Ira Berlin, an author, about his book 'Many Thousands Gone', a history of slavery.

That is the message of this impeccably presented history of American slavery from 1619, when John Rolfe brought ''twenty Negars'' to the Jamestown colony, to the 1820s, when the spirit of emancipation began to take hold in the North. The history of slavery in North America is not as simple, clear-cut or tidy as is often believed.

Berlin many thousands gone