In this masterly work, Ira Berlin, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, has demonstrated that earlier North American slavery had many different forms and meanings that varied over time and from place to place. But it would be misleading to read it back into the two centuries of slavery between the arrival of the first blacks in Virginia in 1619 and the rise of the Cotton Kingdom in the early 19th century - and not merely because the crops being grown were different. Fredrickson, in an article entitled, "Of Human Bondage: In the 17th and 18th centuries, a historian says, the idea of slavery was not yet firmly defined," on 4 October 1998 - The conventional image of a gang of slaves picking cotton under the watchful eye of a master or an overseer would be true to the experience of a large proportion of the Southern black population in the decades just before the Civil War. As reviewed in the New York Times, by George M.
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