ABSTRACT
Herbert Gutman’s The black family in slavery and freedom, 1750–1925 represents the fusion of the traditional with the innovative in research techniques, scholarly enquiry, and interpretation. The result is a major contribution in an area of slavery largely ignored by scholars: the slave family in history. Its publication is of importance not only for the historiography of the United States, but of the Americas. In general terms the crowns of Spain and Portugal and ecclesiastical policies in their empires in the Americas encouraged slave marriages and the protection of slave families. This chapter suggests a pan-American dimension to the situation of the black family in the Americas described by Herbert Gutman for the English-speaking North American mainland. Only time and further research will confirm the validity of an approach which infers values or belief systems from what is essentially behavioral evidence.
