THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE AND NEW ENGLAND SLAVERY: HOW WE REMEMBER, HOW WE FORGET

Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. Edited by Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xvi + 320 pp. Notes and index. $19.95.

Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780–1860. By Joanne Pope Melish. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1998. xvi + 296 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $35.00.

Donald R. Wright
SUNY-Cortland

These books focus on aspects of African American history and how that history is, and has been, remembered. They vary in form—one is a collection of papers from a multi-disciplinary conference, the other a standard history monograph—but both show how people long after the fact have shaped, and continue to shape, the past to fit their present consciousness.