Summary Of Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone

Ira Berlin 's Many Thousands Gone; The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America is a synthetic text that combines information from hundreds of books to form one comprehensive text concerning slavery in the North American colonies. The book begins following the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia in 1619 and ends around 1815 as the Age of Revolution recedes and the Antebellum Period begins. Berlin divides the book into different sections based on region and the time period. The four regions of the United States are the Chesapeake, which transforms into the upper South, the Low Country, the North, and Mississippi. Berlin further divides these four regions into three different time periods; these time periods are the Charter Generations, the Plantation Generations, in the Revolutionary Generations. The book does not go beyond the revolutionary period and the fourth era, the antebellum period is not addressed by Berlin. The division of the book into twelve different …show more content…
The question "did racism cause slavery or did slavery cause racism?” forms an integral part of the book. It is stated that racism became a key part of society to justify the institution of slavery in America. All across the colonies, even in the societies in which the economy was not entirely dependent upon slave labor, slaves and their free labor were used to bolster and build the economy. In areas like the north and the Mississippi Valley in which more slaves lived in urban areas and interacted with their white counterparts more often, the racial divide wasn 't as stark. However, disparities in the treatment of different races became more extreme in areas like the Low country and the Chesapeake, where economic events such as the rice revolution and tobacco revolution completely changed the area 's agriculture, and the status of a slave completely changed to suit the needs of the cash