“Ira Berlin begins this book by recounting a conversation he had several years ago with a small group of black radio technicians, most of them recent immigrants born in Africa or the Caribbean. He had just been interviewed on a local public radio station on the topic “Who freed the slaves?” Berlin had argued that enslaved Southerners played a significant role in their own liberation. He found that the technicians were “deeply interested” in the events leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863; yet he was troubled by the fact that they felt these events “had nothing to do with them. Simply put, it was not their history….”

Read the rest at Slate.