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Children of Fire: A History of African Americans. By Thomas C. Holt. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Pp. [xviii], 438. $30.00, ISBN 978-08090-6713-8.)
In this masterwork of interpretative historical synthesis, the renowned historian Thomas C. Holt engages the familiar saga of African American life by using a remarkably fresh perspective - weaving an intergenerational series of biographical sketches into a diachronic history that personalizes African American history for its readers. Expertly, the glosses vividly connect the personal dimension of individual black lives with broader political and social currents running amid the American landscape. Holt contextualizes his subjects thickly and deeply, examining the background to black life throughout the Atlantic world, from Europe to Africa and Latin America. His study takes us back to the earliest moments of the slave trade to discuss the origins of the Afro-Atlantic world. He then ushers readers through a tour-de-force examination of the intricacies of the slave trade, taking into account the latest and best historiographical findings. At every tum, Holt is concise, informative, and judicious. His skillful hand has produced an eminently readable narrative, grippingly told and valuable to scholars and lay readers alike.
The heart of the book begins in the second chapter. Here, the collage of interconnected biographies begins to take shape. Holt's examination of what Ira Berlin, in Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), has called the "charter generation" of...