Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (review)

90CIVIL war history together skillfully. He rescues the lesser-known Beechers from obscurity and offers fresh insights into the familiar careers of Lyman, Harriet, Henry Ward, and Catharine. He discusses in detail their role in a variety of issues, especially slavery, civil rights, and the women's movement. Specialists may be put off by his lack of references to current scholarly literature in those areas and by the minimal notes and bibliography. Nevertheless , the analysis is informed and intelligent, the balance impressive . Rugoff's literary criticism of Harriet's lesser novels, while not always convincing, sheds valuable light in a neglected corner. Throughout the book religion is the leitmotif binding the most disparate of subjects together. From Rugoff's group portrait emerges a clear sense of why Calvinism was not a religion for America. The fear of hell made life a living hell for Lyman's own children; to other Americans the rigors of self-denial simply became irrelevant to their ambitions. So tortuous a road to salvation could not compete with the promise of material success. It was the gift of newer ministers like Henry Ward Beecher to sense this change and provide it a theology that detached the world and the flesh from the devil. Much has been written about this transformation but few have depicted it with such graphic clarity as Rugoff. The research is impressive, the writing graceful. This is a rewarding, often compelling book, worth the attention of scholars or anyone interested in nineteenth-century America. Maury Klein University of Rhode Island Long Memory: The Black Experience in America. By Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Pp. xxi, 486. $19.95.) In discussing African survivals in the American slave community, authors Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame quote an Ashanti proverb: "Ancient things remain in the ears" (p. 32). It is a particularly good quotation for reminding a society used to the printed word that an unwritten history is not a forgotten one. The modern black community, the authors point out, is resting on a foundation of rich history endowed it by its forebears. Its "long memory" reaches back past the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois to the folklife of illiterate slaves who nurtured the recollections of Africa in the proverbs and stories they told to their children. It is the authors' purpose to survey that past and to restore the "human substance and spirit" (p. x) to its telling. Berry, a professor of history and law at Howard University, and Blassingame , a professor of history at Yale University, facilitate their purpose by replacing the usual chronological narrative of other surveys of Afro-American history with a topical organization that emphasizes the "subjects most revealing of the complexities of the black experience in BOOK REVIEWS91 America" (p. x). They explore slavery—the black community's formative experience—and the family and the church—its two most important institutions—as well as the uneasy place of the free Negro in antebellum America, sex and racism, politics, economics, criminal justice, education , military service, black protest, and black nationalism. Their approach succeeds in producing insightful interpretive chapters that synthesize a large bibliography of secondary materials and provide the vehicles for the authors' own well-known areas of research expertise. The topical approach always seems to keep one alert to the "two-ness" of Du Bois's black souls, and the authors are adept at showing how the black experience was apart from but still of the larger history. A particularly striking example is their treatment of blacks and military service. By fighting for America's causes, the authors note, blacks fought to advance their own. The sadness here, of course, comes from knowing that many gave their lives for a country that restricted the freedom of the survivors and neglected the memory of their community's heroes. While historians will find much of what Berry and Blassingame write familiar, Long Memory will provide their undergraduate classes with stimulating reading that should provoke classroom discussion. The authors have not avoided controversy and at times their words take on an outraged tone...