Free The Making of African America by Ira Berlin Page A

environment in which they could grow. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project has been my intellectual home, even after I left home; a new member and an old hand—John McKerley and Susan O’Donovan, respectively—took a special interest in my project, for which I am most grateful. Professor O’Donovan, now of the University of Memphis, permitted me to quote from her own work on slave mobility. A grant from the University of Maryland’s Graduate Research Board allowed me to launch this study, and a fellowship at the W. E. B. DuBois Center for the Study of the African Diaspora at Harvard University provided quiet time to think through the ideas and begin to put them on paper. The Center’s director, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and my fellow fellows—Vincent Carretta, Prudence Cumberbatch, Derek Hydra, Marisa Parham, Jeffery Steward, Wole Soyinka, and Ermien van Pletzen—provided an intellectual perspective that reached from Cape Cod to Cape Coast to Cape Town. When the manuscript was complete, Skip Gates read key chapters with his usual discerning eye.
    Others have also read parts of the manuscript and saved me from numerous errors of fact and judgment with the kind of encouragement that only friends can provide. I would like especially to thank Ronald Hoffman, Ted Maris-Wolf, and Sally Mason—good friends from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture—who shared their thoughts while we collectively contemplated the meaning of the Middle Passage during the institute’s historic conference in the shadow of the great slave factory at El Mina. William Chafe and Gary Gerstle, along with David Freund and Julie Greene, helped me navigate what to me was the strange terrain of twentieth-century historiography. Finally, Eric Foner, Steven Hahn, Leslie Harris, and Marcus Rediker read the entire manuscript, offering guidance on the whole.
    Early on in my research on migration and place, while sitting at one of Chris Vadala’s jam sessions in the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts, I—as much from naïveté as from ignorance—saw connections between African American migrations and African American music. Thereafter, I called upon two friends, Harvey Cohen and Bill Ferris, to help me enlarge those connections. Their deep knowledge of the development of black music allowed me to make connections I otherwise would have missed.
    Among the most important members of the community of historians are those apprentices we have come to call students. There is no better testing ground for ideas than the classroom, where the tolerance for sloppy thinking and shallow thoughts is small indeed. I would like to thank my many students at the University of Maryland for their impatience as well as their patience as I tested untried ideas. In addition, several more advanced students have aided this study in a variety of practical ways, tracking down fugitive texts, checking endnotes, and proofreading yet incomplete texts. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Katrina Keane, Megan Coplen, and Kimberly Welch for their good cheer and keen eye.
    Also of good cheer and keen eye, Wendy Wolf, my editor, oversaw the development of The Making of African America, herself making knowing corrections to keep the matters on course and on time. Her imprint has made a difference. So has the timely interventions of Sandra Dijkstra, agent and friend, who poked and prodded until I made critical changes which made this book more accessible and better.
    Like much artisanal work, making history—at least my history—is done within the bounds of a household. Members of my extended household—now, thanks to Samantha, three generations deep—proved it was possible to balance the world and the world of ideas. Lisa and Bob, Richard and Kara, and now Samantha gave meaning to this whole enterprise. Martha, as always, made it not only possible, but also great fun.
    John Hope Franklin and