Slaves Without Masters

The Free Negro in the Antebellum South

Ira Berlin

paperback

$18.95 / £12.99

Widely recognized as “one of the nation’s foremost scholars on the slave era” (Boston Globe), Bancroft Prize–winning historian Ira Berlin has changed the way we think about African American life in slavery and freedom. These two classic volumes, now available in handsome new editions, are indispensable resources for educators and general readers alike.

First published to great acclaim in 1974, Slaves Without Masters established Berlin in his field and went on to win the National History Society’s Best First Book Prize. It tells the moving story of the quarter of a million free black men and women who lived in the South before the Civil War, portraying “with careful scholarship, acute analysis, and admirable historical imagination” (The New Republic) their struggle for community, economic independence, and education within an oppressive society.

Ira Berlin is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland in College Park, where he lives. He is the author of Many Thousands Gone and Generations of Captivity and the co-editor of Remembering Slavery, Families and Freedom, and Slavery in New York (The New Press). His books have won the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Abraham Lincoln Prize, among many other awards.