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reviews



  • Lee's Fault: On Allen Guelzo's Biography

    by John Reeves

    A reviewer concludes that Allen Guelzo's new biography succeeds in evaluating Robert E. Lee's military career but misses in its assessment of his relationship to slavery and his legacy.



  • Why Did the Slave Trade Survive So Long?

    by James Oakes

    James Oakes reviews John Harris's new book "The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage," and praises its insight into the late years of the slave trade and slavery's relationship to capitalism. 



  • Review: Was the Constitution a Pro-Slavery Document?

    by Gordon S. Wood

    Gordon Wood says James Oakes's new book examines the dialectical relationship between 19th century interpretations of the Constitution as a pro-slavery and anti-slavery document and argues that that debate steered Lincoln toward a commitment to racial equality as inextricable from abolition.



  • Eric Williams’ Foundational Work on Slavery, Industry, and Wealth

    by Katie Donington

    Debates over Eric Williams’s work have ebbed and flowed ever since he first published Capitalism and Slavery in 1944. His book inspired a body of historiography to which many historians of slavery and abolition have added their voices over the decades.


  • A Tale of the Great Migration

    by Bruce Chadwick

    Blues for an Alabama Sky, a new play by Pearl Cleage, tells the story of a handful of those people. It is a deep, rich play in which their stories are carried out against the cultural backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance.