There can be no more powerful telling of the history of slavery in the United States than to read it and hear it from the slaves' own mouths. Their recollections are, for the most part, graphic and chilling, but the diversity of these life experiences are also rich with good stories, too....slaves bonding together, looking out for one another and at times outwitting their masters and overseers. While the general knowledge of salvery has been known to many Americans for years, it is the actual detailed accounts of day-to-day life that make this book come alive. I hadn't known, for instance, that slaves were required to have passes in order to travel off the plantations or that Christmas and New Year's were largely times of rejoicing for both slave families and their master's families. Yet for the rest of the year the hardships and conditions that most slaves witnessed was incredible....beatings often for no reason, no shoes or lack of other clothing during the winter cold and often not nearly enough food. The clarity with which these former slaves recall their life 80 years or more before is an indication of how etched in their young minds life had been. The accompanying audio cassettes were the main reason l bought the book and they simply added a human dimension to the whole story. l had only two small disappointments with the audio segment....l would rather have had none of the actors read the transcripts...(the actual slave voices are far more powerful) and l wish that photos of the slave speakers could have been provided.... while there were many photos of the former slaves in the book they were not the photos of the slaves who made the audio tapes. In a time where revisionist history seems to be the rage it is, in a strange way, rather comforting to hear these stories told by the people who lived them. How these men and women suffered under bondage and lived for so many years afterward to finally tell about it is a tribute to their spirit and courage.

I am currently a high school student that read part of this for a Civil War class and let me say this is one powerful book. With people who were the slaves themselves tell you their stories, you learn alot about the antebellum period. I would recommend this book for any mature person due to the fact that some of these stories show the true horror of slavery.

For several years I've been reading powerful thought-provoking slave narratives. This is probably the most moving due to accompanying tapes of slaves discussing their thoughts and conditions when they were slaves. This book and tapes should be used in every high school American and World history classes. I recommend this book to everyone above the age of twelve. If you want to begin educating your children earlier about American history, specifically slavery have them read K.J. McWilliams books; The Journal of Darien Duff, an Emancipated Slave, The Diary of a Slave Girl, Ruby Jo, and The Journal of Leroy Jones, a Fugitive Slave. They are based on slave narratives such as this one and include many interesting photos as well as additional information.

This book added a great deal to my knowledge of the first two centuries of slavery in North America. Berlin's primary document research is marvelous and the details that he was able to find out about slave life during this period are astounding. Berlin found out that the process of dehumanizing slaves was one that took time and varied from region to region, and he goes into specific economic and cultural factors that played the role in establishing and keeping slavery in the states.
Often the creation of the peculiar institution and the diversity of slave life is glossed over in textbooks. They ignore the important role that economic factors play from region to region. Berlin argues that the north did not have fewer slaves because northerners were more conscientious or less racist than southerners(as many would like to think), but because the majority of them simply could not profit as well from slave labor.

An excellent scholarly work that shows wide diversity in the lives of slaves durring the first two centuries of its existance.

This book is, along with Morgan's work on the Lowcountry and Eugene Genovese's entire corpus, the outstanding work in the field. Berlin organizes his material both spatially and temporally, which allows him to give a feeling for the distinctions across the decades and from place to place. Even experts in American history will learn from every page.

My only caveat is that, despite the enormous effort that obviously went into this book, it came out with a plethora of grammatical errors. False parallelisms, single possessives in place of plurals, and numerous other basic grammatical mistakes mar the text, so that the careful reader cannot help but be distracted from the actual topic. Alas, this certainly colors my impression of what otherwise is an outstanding piece of work; too bad. Prof. Berlin's editors at Harvard definitely dropped the ball.

To most Americans, including most scholars, slavery in the USA is usually thought of as chattel slavery associated with the plantation economies of the Antebellum South. This is a book on slavery in North America in the two centuries prior to the antebellum period. Berlin takes pains to present slavery over this extended period of time as historically dynamic and regionally diverse. Berlin is excellent at showing how changes in the Atlantic economy, political events such as the American Revolution, and international diplomacy all contributed to changes in the world experienced by slaves and slaveholders. This is true history from below emphasizing the experience of slaves. Berlin is particularly good at exploring the rich regional diversity of the slave experience in North America. This will simply be the standard book on this topic for decades to come. Written with grace, some passion, and an excellent bibliography.

Berlin is dishonest when he claims to be writing about blacks. About 75% of "free colored" in the antebellum period were visibly mixed-race or whiter. Some "mulattoes" were Indians with no African ancestry at all.

I guess I am not reading the same book as the other guy. I saw this book as well written, well reasearched, relevant and extremely factual. Berlin's entire book is based on nothing but facts, and he has tons of sources that he refered to. He hs a lot of great refrences, old news papers(which are interesting to read), cogress meeting records, the laws of that time, the census, and lots of other great forms of accurate facts. "Slaves Without Masters" exposed a lot about a time period in american life that was very interesting for a "free" African-American. The book is about the free negroes in the antebellem south, which in most southern states were between 60 and 80 percent of the "free" African-American population, this would explain why we hear a lot in this book about Mulattos. THE MAIN BENEFIT OF THIS BOOK IS THAT IN A DOCUMENT PROVEN AND FACTUAL WAY, EVEN "FREE" PEOPLE CAN BE SLAVES.

This review is written by someone who has just became acquainted with many of the details of the enslavement of [African][-][Americans] on the land that would eventually become the United States of America. "Generations of Captivity" introduced me to this long and tragic history. Written in a simple narrative format, helpfully broken up into five generations of African American slavery--the Charter [~1600-1720], Plantation [~1720-1776], Revolutionary [1776-1812], Migration [1812-1861] and Freedom generations--as well as geographical regions, Berlin's narrative of this ugly spectacle in American history is easy to follow and extremely informative to newcomers to the subject like myself. That being said, the book appears to be an abridged version of his previous book, "Many Thousands Gone." There are very few direct quotes from primary sources, and the statistics provided during the narrative are general at best (though a table of statistics is provided in an appendix). While Berlin's book introduced me to many of the specificities of slavery in the United States, I got the nagging feeling that, while I was reading this, something was missing. I'm probably being too critical, as each generation he writes about has most likely been the subject of numerous book-length studies in and of themselves, and it is Berlin's job here to condense all of them into a single narrative. This book is a very good introduction to the topic and I feel I have some more insight into it now. But those who have spent plenty of time with this subject material might want to search elsewhere.