James Oliver Horton is widely known for the pioneering thought of Boston's antebellum black community that he published with Lois E Horton in 1979 This was the first scholarly studious mood of a free black community based upon the kinds of materials - tax records.

James Oliver Horton is widely known for the pioneering thought of Boston's antebellum black community that he published with Lois E Horton in 1979 This was the first scholarly studious mood of a free black community based upon the kinds of materials - tax records, manuscript tax recurs and the like - that have undergirded the explosion of social history in the last generation. Many other studies of liberated black communities have extended the Hortons' contemplation but all historians owe a due methodologically and conceptually, to their application of mind of black Bostonians.

In emancipated People of Color, a collection of ten essays, six of which have been published earlier in journals, Horton stretch outs his research to Buffalo, Washington, DC and Cincinnati, while in a certain of the essays he deals more generally with clear African Americans in the North. Several essays are based in succession quantitative research, such as "Shades of Color: The Mulatto in Three Antebellum Northern Communities," where census tracts for 1850 and 1860 have been propose to effective use. Other essays are based primarily upon literary sources, as in "Freedom's Yoke: form relative to sex Convention Among Free Blacks," where the reader will find an illuminating cogitation drawn from black newspaper evidence, of "the impact of race in succession the relationships of black women and men" (99) Thus, readers will find a rich combination of quantitative studies of social and economic life as at liberty black communities gathered, grew, and became more manifold in the nineteenth century; and qualitative studies of attitudes, ideologies, values, and political behavior. Ranging widely as he does, Horton admirably combines his research with the astounding efflorescence of scholarship in the last several decades. The footnotes for these ten essays constitute a valuable bibliography in themselves.

Of particular note, these essays depict the ripening of scholarship forward early African American history. In constructing arguments to dismantle the story of African Americans as relatively powerless victims of white oppression, a band of historians in the 1960 and 1970 formed a model of black potency dynamism, resilience, and resistance - a design neatly summed up in the phrase black community (whether unrestrained slave, or mixed). Horton's essays showcase a more mature circle of time of scholarship wherein a mediation is general intented between victims' history and heroic history. Horton candidly addresses issues of black diversity, disunity, internal stratification, and cross-cutting tendencies. (Black communities were no more homogeneous or monolithic than white communities.) Thus he explores with discernment the fissures that appeared in black communities - internal differences emerging on the outside of social status, skin color, inflection for sex religion, and ideological predispositions.

From the research, we can behold for example, that in Cincinnati the residential separation between dark-skinned blacks and light-skinned mulattoes was as great as between blacks and whites in Brooklyn; still on crucial issues black urbanites could coalesce in Northern cities as it was as Cincinnati. In another important essay upon black-German relations in Buffalo, Horton (with coauthor Hartmut Keil) finds substantial intermarriage between German immigrants and native-born African Americans in an era when white hostility to independent blacks in Northern cities was growing rapidly. Horton and Keil find that this unusual racial mixing was help oned by a general absence of work at jobs competition (as distinct from the black/Irish situation) and on the liberalism of immigrant Germans that "challenged the blatant racism of the Democratic party" (179) This nifty piece of research, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, warns against racial essentialist approaches.

Such explorations into the complexities of African American history in nineteenth-century Northern cities make Horton's exempt People of Color an important contribution to the scholarship.

Reviewed by means of Gary B. Nash University of California, observes Angeles

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