Slavery was known as a "peculiar institution". By broadcasting such labels for slavery, the southern slave owners were able to downplay the severity of the subjugation of slaves in this "peculiar institution". However, in 1845 a runaway slave by the name of Frederick Douglass was published his narrative which showed the extent of the cruelty within of the oppressive the institution of American slavery. Douglass gives a powerful portrayal of his personal struggle against the tyranny of himself and his fellow slaves. By depicting his personal story regarding the horrors of slavery, Douglass testified to the injustices of the slave institution and conveyed an urgent message of the time for prompt abolition.
Douglass leaves out no detail as he portrays the brutal means in which slaves were forced into subjugation. In order to maintain order and to achieve maximum efficiency and productivity from his slave, an owner used the fear of the ever-present whip against his slaves. Over, and over again throughout the Narrative, Douglass gives account of severe beatings, cruel tortures, and unjust murders of slaves. The message is evident. Slavery dehumanized African Americans.
From the introduction of his early experience, Douglass portrays the burdens of slavery. The reader is forced to cope with the fact that he has no tangible background. Slavery has robbed him of the precious moments of his childhood. He was raised in the same manner as one would raise an animal. In his early years he had no knowledge of time-he did not even know when he was born. He is also forced to scrounge for food in the same fashion as a pig digs for slop. The saddest insight is the alienation of Douglass from his family. He has no connection with his parents and when his mother dies he was untouched. On hearing of her death he states, "I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger" (19). The bond between mother and child is the strongest bulwark for children and to be robbed of this and to not care demonstrates just how severe slavery was to Douglass and countless others who faced the same fate. In the entire slave experience, the only escape from the repression was through sorrowful singing. As Douglass states, "every tone was a testimony against slavery..." and "slaves sing the most when they are unhappy" (29). Only through music could slaves find comfort in dealing with their anguish.
Douglass's first witness of brutality is the telling of his Aunt Hester's beating. The narration is powerfully effective through terrible detail. The cursing of the overseer, the shrieks of his aunt, and the horrible effects the whip upon her flesh is almost as agonizing the reader of the Narrative as it was to his unfortunate aunt. The fact that this terrible instance is a common occurrence makes it a heavier burden upon the reader's soul.
As if the beatings were not enough, slaves were also murdered on a whim. Douglass tells of Gore, a meticulously cold taskmaster who blew out the brains of a poor slave by the name of Demby. The chilliness of Gore's is terrible due the fact that he kills with the sympathy of a butcher.
Upon hearing about this, one would speculate that the authorities would deal with such barbaric acts justly. However, as Douglass recounts in the story Mrs. Hicks, the murderess that killed a slave girl for not moving fast enough, the law officials were hesitant to enforce the rights of the slave and would intentionally overlook such matters. This is primarily due to the fact that a slave owning society could not allow the rights of the slave to be upheld to the same level as a white man. To do such a thing would threaten the stability of their superiority. This is further illustrated in Douglass's struggle against the shipyard workers, when he fled to his master and told him of the attack his master stated that he could not hold up Douglass or even a thousand blacks testimony. The lack of protection under the law and the unwillingness of the whites to give the slaves a voice allowed the whites to completely dominate the slaves without the fear of accountability for their actions.
The worst aspect of slavery is found in the religious nature of the subjugation of slaves. The cruelty found in slavery was even more intense when placed under the pretense of the slaveholding religion of Christianity. Through Douglass's deconstruction of Christianity, he learns that the white oppressive version of Christianity is much different from his own beliefs of Christianity. The incident that shaped Douglass's understanding of the mentality of religious slaveholders was when he was placed under the authority of Mr. Freeland. In this situation, he was able to see the difference between the so-called "religious slave-holders" and "non-religious slave-holders." Douglass felt that the "non-religious slave-holders" were less brutal because they did not reprimand their slaves based on a Divine command. Instead they were more concerned about reprimanding the slaves when the slaves did wrong as opposed to whenever they felt that the Lord professed a beating.
The Narrative and Selected Writings is a powerful testimony to the struggles American slaves faced. Through the writings of men such as Frederick Douglass, abolitionists were given fuel to the bonfire of the Abolition Movement. Douglass honest testimony helped to bring out the truth about slavery. Abolitionists now had evidence to back their claim that the "peculiar institution" was in fact an institution of evil.

As the title implies, this short work is the narrative of Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave. He wrote it by himself, a significant fact in that his prose is so eloquent and his pathos so powerful that it seems impossible for a former slave to have composed it. In this short autobiography, Douglass recounts his life as a slave, and details some of the horrors and atrocities perpetuated on slaves by their fiendish overseers, most of whom Douglass portrays as downright evil. More than just a narrative of his life, Douglass also gives an account of how the desire to be free grew and began to burn within his bosom, and how he grew to hate that horrible institution. Above all, this is a story of a slave learning that he is, in fact, a human being.

The significance of this book cannot be overestimated. In it, Douglass effectively dispels a number of popular myths about slaves and slaveholders, and forever changes the way the reader (especially one who lived while slavery still existed) looks at slavery. The theme of this book is very simple: slavery is wrong. It is evil, it is cruel, and, despite what many people thought at the time, the slaves know how cruel it is. Douglass cites several examples of the horrible treatment slaves received, one of them being separation of families. "It is a common custom...to part children from their mothers at a very early age" So it was with Douglass and his own mother.

Douglass writes in a very eloquent style, and this contributes to the power of this work. Many people who thought blacks were inferior in intelligence were shown to be sadly mistaken with the coming of Frederick Douglass, a man both educated and refined. It may be said that the book is not entirely fair, for it is decidedly anti-slavery, but it is undoubtedly true for most cases nonetheless. Most of the overseers in Douglass's narrative are demonic and sadistic, but when a good overseer comes along (such as Freeland), he is fair in his treatment of him.

One can imagine the fuel this book gave to the abolitionist fire, and it is not difficult to see why Douglass had such an impact on both North and South. This is, in my opinion, a definitive work, in that it shows the horrible institution of slavery in all its barbaric nature, and does it from a firsthand point of view, that of a former slave. This book was a tremendous contribution, both for the light it shed on slavery in general, and for proving that blacks were not intellectually inferior by nature, but instead were "transformed into...brute[s]" at the hands of their overseers.

This is a great book, essential for anyone wanting to study the Civil War era or wanting to gain a firmer understanding of slavery.

Perhaps more so than any other account, Douglass gives us a look into the life of a slave. I enjoy this book on many level. Douglass writes honestly and in a factual tone. He does mince his words when he describes the brutality of slavery. Douglass demonstrates that he is an intelligent man despite his lack of education. He taight himself to read. To our youth, this demonstrates the value of education. Douglass also show Americans manipulated the work of God even in his time. Yet, Douglass found strength in that God. I think the quality I enjoyed most about this book is the fact that Douglass does not see himself as a hero, but as an average slave. This is not a typical characteristic of an autobiography. I read this book for the second time coming and going on 3 hour flights. The book is a short read, but well worth your time to read of atriumph of the human spirit.

We use this as the main text in my US History AP course. It's a good, fairly comprehensive, yet easy to read text.

I used this textbook as a junior in high school and recently purchased a later edition. Although the wonderful charts plotting the states and electoral numbers of the Presidential elections are long gone it is still a great reference book on our nations history.

My students really enjoyed this textbook because it was so inclusive of all American heritages. It is up-to-date with current trends in American history and has a little bit of everything your students might be interested in.

And so "education" should be, one of many great, though by no means unique, insights into the mind of mankind in W.E.B. Dubois's "Souls of Black Folk." I read this book after reading both the "Autobiography of Malcolm X" as well as Foner's "The Black Panther's Speak." Both of these books make allusion to Dubois, and in reading "Souls" I better understand the ideas and programs of Malcolm, Huey and Eldridge, their desire to be granted the same rights and privileges as all American citizens, and, where the white man continued to disallow it, their taking them "by any means necessary."

Admittedly, I have very little experience with African-American culture. "The Souls of Black Folk" I think helps bridge this gap by exploring the history - economic, social and political - and pyschology of the African-American. I came away with a much better understanding of organizations like the Freeman's Relief Association, men like Booker T. Washington, African-American Christianity and, to a small extent, the psyche of the black man in America, at least its historical antecedents, up until the early 1900s.

I have read reviews dismissing Dubois's work as outdated, especially after the '60s and the civil rights movement. Perhaps it is, though, again, I don't feel I know enough about African-American culture in our day to be able to say either way. Having said that, I am much better acquainted with other socially and economically constructed "niggers" of our world, both domestically and internationally, and in that regard I think Dubois's "Souls of Black Folk" is still very much applicable, in fact a complementary resource from which to glean insight into contemporary politics and economics. Perhaps, hopefully, there will one day be no more "niggers" on American soil. But, unfortunately, there will always be "niggers" in this world, and Dubois's lectures on removing "the great problem of the 20th century - the color line" are as important today as they were 100 years ago.

From "Of the Sons of Master and Man":
In any land, in any country under modern free competition, to lay any class of weak and despised people, be they white, black or blue, at the political mercy of their stronger, richer and more resourceful fellows, is a temptation which human nature seldom has withstood and seldom will withstand.

Perhaps basic, perhaps something one has heard numerous times, but the fact that this citation and many, many others like it to be found in "The Souls of Black Folk" were written 100 years before guys like Ralph Nader and Howard Zinn were selling hundreds of thousands of books based on a slightly different spin of the same argument is at least relevant, if not impressive.

Dubois was no racist, as any of the rest of the aforementioned group weren't either. If anything (and perhaps in this time this is a politically incorrect term) he was a classist, and merely argued for the assimilation of the black man into the society that did not understand their mutual dependence. Reading the book did not produce "white guilt" or anything the David Horwitzes of the world would like to convince me is happening to me. It provided me with a greater understanding and respect for people I daily ride the metro with, work with, am an American citizen WITH.

The Souls of Black Folks, as other reviewers have pointed out, is a masterpiece of African-American thought. But it is even more than that when we consider the context and time in which the book was written. Most of what DuBois discusses is still relevant today, and this is a tribute to the man, not only as a scholar, but as someone who was continually adapting his views in the best image and interests of black people.

Some reviewers refer to DuBois as "the Black Emerson" and, as a university instructor, I heard similar references made: 'the Black Dewey" or "the Black Park," referring to the Chicago School scholars. Du Bois was brilliant; indeed, these white men should be being called "the white Du Bois"! Du Bois literally created the scientific method of observation and qualitative research. With the junk being put out today in the name of "dissertations," simply re-read Du Bois' work on the Suppression of the African Slave Trade and his work on the Philadelphia Negro and it is clear that he needs not be compared to any white man of his time or any other: he was a renaissance man who cared about his people and, unlike too many of the scholars of day, he didn't just talk the talk or write the trite; he walked the walk and organized the unorganizable.

White racism suffered because Du Bois raised the consciousness of the black masses. But he did more than that; by renouncing his American citizenship and moving to Ghana, he proved that Pan Africanism is not just something to preach or write about (ala Molefi Asante, Tony Martin, Jeffries and other Africanists); it is a way of life, both a means and an end. Du Bois organized the first ever Pan African Congress and, in doing so, set the stage for Afrocentricity, Black Studies and the Bandung Conference which would be held in 1954 in Bandung, Indonesia. Du Bois not only affected people in this country, he was a true internationalist.

Souls of Black Folk is an important narrative that predates critical race theory. It is an important reading, which predates formal Black Studies. The book calls for elevation of black people by empowering black communities -- today's leadership is so starved for acceptance that I believe that Karenga was correct when he says that these kind of people "often doubt their own humanity."

The book should be read by all.

At the end of the century, in a few months there will be much debate about the person of the century, the writer of the century, the actor of the century and so on. This book, this writing should put DuBois at the very least in the top five ranking of the most important writer and thinker of the twentieth century. He is as far as I am concerned the Black Nostradamus. He forsaw what has been happening in recent years with the increase of hate crimes and mass acts of violence and oppression against the colored masses of the United States and the world. DuBois like no other from his time captures the spirit of the America Black and he allows his reader to read and to understand what has caused the Black consciousness to be in the state of disaster that it was in and is in in some aspects. He is a great writer and this book should be required reading in every American Literature and Black Literature class in every high school and college in this country. This is an important work not only for Blacks to read but whites as well. Well written and well received is all that I can say about this book. GREAT!!!!!

David Blight's "Race and Reunion" is the latest and best addition to the growing literature on memory in U.S. history. And there is no event that continues to scorch American memory quite like the Civil War.

Blight traces the intimate connections among the growth of the Lost Cause ideology, North-South reconciliation, and the resurgence of white supremacy--not only in the South but throughout the nation. He shows how the promise of a new nation incorporating African Americans--outlined in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Second Inaugural, and in the 14th and 15th Amendments--was sacrificed on the altar of white North-South reunion.

Though ostensibly treating the period after the Civil War, Blight cannot avoid the questions of morality and causality forever lurking in public and scholarly debate over that conflict. To his credit, he does not concede the moral parity of North and South. Certainly, the northern states practiced forms of white supremacy, before and after the war. Certainly, the northern states were, historically, complicit in the creation and maintenance of slavery. But it was southerners who attempted to dissolve the nation by going to war to protect slavery. What did they expect the federal government to do? Let them go? What did they expect Lincoln to do after the war started? Protect slaveholders' property rights? The treason of secessionism only played into the abolitionists hands.

And, make no mistake, in every definition of the word, secessionists were traitors. Despite the veil of patriotism draped upon them by the deluded past and present, the Confederates set out to destroy the nation, the union. In this sense, they put modern-day "traitors" like the "American Taliban" to shame. Moreover, they turned to treason for the basest of reasons--to maintain their illegitimate power over another group of people.

The previous reviewer asserts that many Confederate officers disapproved of slavery. That is true. It is also irrelevant. They knew all too well what they were fighting for. The Confederate government and Constitution were quite honest about it. No measure of Confederate gallantry, largely imagined by post-bellum Civil War buffs, can alter these historical circumstances. You may claim the legality of secession. So what? You may argue for the nobility and honor for the Confederate cause. Absurd. If the Confederate flag had nothing to do with white supremacy, why does it always appear in public when blacks are pressing for their rights? If the Confederate legacy has nothing to do with race, why don't black southerners join you in celebrating it?

The Confederates lost. And despite the whining of the past 137 years, they got off pretty easy--their Reconstruction myths aside. Today, Confederate disciples are allowed to display their flag--even modern-day German Nazis can't do that! No. The only genuine betrayal of southerners was that of black southerners, who spent a century waiting for the federal government to enforce the Constitution--a story that emerges only too cleary in Blight's book.

So, kudos to him for exploring this story, and perhaps making headway against the banality of most Civil War discussions.

David Blight's tale about how the North betrayed its African American supporters--soldiers and civilians--and the selective memory that made it possible, is sad and also instructive. As far as it goes, it's thoroughly documented, telling how the first order of American business in 1865, the reconciliation of North and South, was enabled by systematic avoidance of the root cause of the Civil War, slavery, and the social problems which resulted from it, that is, how to incorporate a huge number of Black Americans who were in competition with the Whites for land, jobs, and opportunity in general, in a shattered economy. Blight sustains his thesis fully: that by 1915 the job was complete and American memory picked clean as far as White memory ws concerned. A white Northerner, I was schooled in the "Gone with the Wind" era and remember well the tale of rapacious Northern carpetbaggers, their dupes the bewildered Blacks, and the gallant Southerners who saved their glamorous way of life by pacifying the Blacks (who had been happy in slavery, anyway). Blight does, of course, go into the constitutional issues of the war and the fact that they were resolved, on paper, by a series of amendments signed as the war ended. But the North didn't follow up on them, though it was in the North's power to do so. The Reconstruction period is controversial for just this reason; Blight disentangles the issues well. We could at any time have remembered less selectively, and acted more concretely, to ensure that the causes of the war, plus the problems of the years after Appomattox, were solved in fact, as they had been solved on paper.

This was a complex time; and Blight's focus on selective memory and its effects can't go on to the interesting question of "why." What stopped the victors from insisting that our memories produce more concrete justice? Interested readers might like to expand into some other issues of the period 1865-1915, like the need to re-work American thought, in Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club"; the widening problem of poverty in the cities, in Joan Waugh's "Unsentimental Reformer"; or the birth and rise of consumerism, in William Leach's "Land of Desire." These are just three of the issues which sidelined a just and concrete Reconstruction.

The resulting avoidance was not merely unjust to the Blacks, it was--and is--tragic for the nation at large because it deprives us all of the gifts they could have bestowed on the community, and of many that they still could. Meanwhile national avoidance, and its setting in selective memory, remain with us. Civil War re-enactors happily volunteer to portray gallant Confederate troops, movies like "Gettysburg" are still produced, Dixie's flag still flies, and Blight's book tells us, unsparingly, just why. Alas, he does us a service.

David W. Blight has written a monumental study about the central place of memory in American life. While Race and Reunion specifically deals with the end of the Civil War to 1913 (the fiftieth reunion of Gettysburg), it is a powerful reminder that how we think about our past defines our present and shapes our future.
Blight's book is a necessary antidote for the easy nostalgia that too many Americans feel for ugly periods of our history. Indeed, the recent comments by Senator Trent Lott show that we have not fully learned the lessons that are so evident in this book.
As Bernard Malamud wrote in The Fixer: "There's something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property. The stink of that corruption never escapes the soul, and it is the stink of future evil."
Race and Reunion tells how slavery went from being seen as corrupt to being remembered as an integral part of a respectable lifestyle. It also explains how the myths of the Lost Cause were told and retold throughout the nation until most of them became part of our accepted history.
Blight uses extensive citations in his reconstruction of the campaign to legitimize the Confederate cause, the honor of rebel soldiers, and the belief that slavery was a mostly benign practice. The success of those wishing to rehabilitate the Old South was astonishing. Blight details a fact that I had never known, and one that is among the most outrageous in our history. In 1923, the United States Senate appropriated $200,000 for a memorial to beloved and faithful mammies. This monument would have been located on Massachusetts Avenue and would have been the only national monument depicting African American "heroes." Thankfully, the bill died in the House.
Throughout this book there are other detailed analyses of how emancipation and reconstruction were all but deleted from our nation's collective understanding of the causes and outcomes of the war. The value of Race and Reunion cannot be overstated. Professor Blight's work offers its readers the chance to begin to understand our tragic past and troubled present.

You will not learn anything new in this book that you don't already know. The book consists of 4 or 5 different essays written by 4 or 5 different authors. It isn't a clear book describing the civil war. I was looking for a book that described each of the reasons for the start of the civil war. This book didn't do that. Each essay tried to make a different point - but it was not clear. The book was too scattered for me. So if you want a more in depth, and more straight forward book about the start of the civil war - try another author.

In the face of recent debates over the Confederate flag flying over South Carolina's capital, a lot has been said regarding the author's subject. Some contend that the war was over state's rights and others contend it was over the issue of slavery. It has even been suggested by many sources that Lincoln came to oppose slavery late. I bought this book hoping to read an author who both knew history and could examine the facts impartially. I clearly found both.

The editor explores pre-Civil War history through the voices of the main figures and groups. In the process I discovered that both states rights and anti-slavery contentions are correct. However, these two are so closely tied that it hardly matters, as you will discover through the eyes of the players. Please read this book. This book should be required reading in every high school history class in America.

I found the book to be the best slice of easy reading history I've ever read, and highly applicable to related debates of the 21st century.

Incidentally, if you are interested in the unique origins of the Republican party, the formation of our two parties, the demise of early parties, the early black leaders, the early womens' movements or even early trends in women's literature, this is an amazing read regarding those topics alone. Can't put it down, highligher in hand stuff.

I found this book to be more of a so-called cultural study instead of the old-fashioned facts-and-chronologies accounts of history. The book is highly opinionated to the point where the events unfold along the lines of the author's opinion about the matter. I also found the book to be heavily slanted to the Left-wing way of thinking.

My son was required to read this book for his history studies at school, but I can't help but wonder if there is any good American history book that plainly tells the facts.