In Berlin's calculus, "it can best be revealed by examining the elements-four in number-that shaped the long struggle for universal freedom. Some historians have interpreted emancipation as a continuous linear progression toward freedom, while others have presented slavery and anti-slavery as parallel trajectories in which "emancipation's road was long and bumpy," its outcome uncertain.
Emancipation, in short, was a critical moment in the history of racialization-and it, too, was a long process." At every turn, the coincidence between blackness and slavery, was reconstituted in the creation of a new relationship. In 211 riveting pages, he "connects the arrival of freedom with the post-emancipation standing of former slaves, hence the debate over citizenship and its attributes, among them race, as well as with the confrontation over property-in-man that made some people rich. Seldom has anyone captured the essence of so vital and complex a phenomenon in such a cohesive manner. "Freedom's arrival was not the work of a moment it was a process, rather than an occasion." That is the organizing thesis of The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States by Ira Berlin, the premier historian of American slavery world.
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