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Book Reviews Edited by Thomas D. Hamm Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. By Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. xvi + 249 pp. Illustrations, map, tables, notes, and index. $24.95. We have come to expect good history from these two authors, and this work lives up to that expectation. And what do we mean by "good history"? First, one wants history that is well-grounded in a number of different kinds of sources, each of which will help balance the biases inherent in a particular kind of source. Laws and statutes tell us something about where the tensions lie in a society, but they don't tell us much about an ordinary person's daily life. Diaries tell us about a specific person's experience, but they don't tell us about how "typical" is that experience, or how that experience compares with the experience of the non-literate or non-introspective. Newspapers tell us only what is "newsworthy," tax records only what is economically valuable, church records only what is of religio-social importance. Many public records give us only the point of view of the powerful, and we have relied upon aggregated records for our picture of the inarticulate. The "old" history—history as humanities—was often good narrative, but, just as often, limited in its perspectives. Women were often missing or one-dimensional, Blacks and the underclasses were often invisible. The "new history"—history as social science—gave us trends and generalities about a wider range of people, but it has often been dismal reading. Precious little of either "old" or "new" history intertwines the story of many different kinds of people into the unified narrative that they all would have lived. This volume combines the best of it all. Nash and Soderlund directed a large band of graduate and undergraduate sleuths to tease details out of wills, court records, manumission books, church records, diaries, letters and newspapers in order to compose this well-orchestrated and highly readable short volume. Elevating massive amounts of data to something far more than statistics and computergenerated tables (though there is an ample amount of these), Nash and Soderlund have brought alive Quakers, anti-Quakers, Methodists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, men, women, Black, white, old, young, lawmakers and lawbreakers and have shown their lives with all the complexity of reality. The ambivalence and ambiguity with which slavery was ended in Pennsylvania are explored so that "good guys" are "good" some of the time, and for some of the "right" reasons. "Bad" guys are human, even "good" some of the time. The well-known soloists we are accustomed to in the story of abolition—Anthony Benezet, John Woolman, Benjamin Franklin, William Penn, Richard Allen—have their stories retold in the context of the life stories and behavior of less well known characters whose actions intertwined with their lives: the wives, daughters, slaves, free Black neighbors who, acting as independent agents with their own ideas and agendas, helped shape the contours and outcomes of Pennsylvania's "abolition." How and why masters manumitted slaves, and how that changed from decade to decade is explored in the context of the Blacks' own goals in shaping and refining a "free" life. We get a picture of how and why rural manumission patterns differed from urban, of the dynamic between economic demands that affected the uses of indentured labor and slave labor, of the relationship between these trends and events in the international community (Santo Domingo, England, 108Quaker History France), and of the strategies of such idealistic organizations as the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. The interplay of class, race and gender issues is effortlessly and naturally woven throughout the narrative, avoiding the "separate-chapter" treatment often afforded these topics. The authors promise a volume "about the tug of war between ideological commitments and economic interests, between leaders and followers, between slaves and masters that occurred in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century over the issue of slavery." They deliver admirably on that promise. Savvy reviewers are supposed to scour the text for flaws in reasoning or interpretation in the volumes they review. One is hard-pressed to do this with...

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