The seminar on American slavery was given by Oscar Handlin, stout, eminent, brilliant, a driving force behind the rise of social and ethnic history as fields worthy of study. His particular focus was immigration. He had won the Pulitzer Prize fifteen years earlier for The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People, and followed it in 1959 with a sympathetic history of the internal migration of blacks and Puerto Ricans in the United States. He was a supporter of the civil rights movement before it had a name. And like me, he was from Brooklyn, and all those years in Cambridge could not take the Brooklyn out of him. You know Brooklyn was a breeding ground for regional historians—southern! There’s me, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, Lawrence Levine—Eric Foner claims he was born on the other side of the bridge in Manhattan, but that Brooklyn DNA is all over his work. We all grew up in that incredible borough of ferment during a time of soaring expectations in a part of the country that was still savoring the Allies’ victory over fascism in Europe and the Pacific. Most thrilling of all, Jackie Robinson was integrating the Brooklyn Dodgers and transforming sports in the United States. The country was fixated on everything he did. Every hit, every run he scored, every base he stole, every insult he shouldered, every fight he avoided. We were watching, and we felt we were living at the beginning of a new era.

That wasn’t all that was happening. I can still hear my parents talking in low voices about the influx of certain people into the community, into our very apartment building. My father called them “refs,” short for refugees, and it wasn’t pronounced with affection. The poor souls had come from displaced persons’ camps in Europe. They arrived here disoriented and lost. Many of them made a great success of life in America. Today we honor these people and call them survivors. But not then; then they were refugees from a calamity that had no name but that somehow had something to do with my family and me. Some refs had numbers tattooed on their left forearms; some tried to hide the tattoos and others tried to show them off. On Friday nights, in summer, windows open wide to catch a breeze, a great roar would shake the building—it was the Sabbath, but it was noisy as hell. We lived just three blocks from Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers played—and we didn’t know if Jackie Robinson had hit a home run or if people in the building were reliving their nightmares. For me, race and the Holocaust, as the genocide came to be called, were two peas in a pod. It was true for Professor Handlin as well, and his slavery seminar was inspired in part by Stanley Elkins’s book Slavery—the work that introduced post–World War II Americans to the skeleton of slavery in their closets. Elkins makes an analogy between pre–Civil War plantations of old and Nazi death camps, or rather between the personalities of slaves and inmates; then he destroys the analogy; but it’s too late, the suggestion has been made, the genie has been let out of the bottle. Well, Handlin blew the roof off the seminar room when he asked, “How do we know that the slaves wanted to be free?” Three hours could not begin to allow everyone who wanted to speak to have a say.

A year later I was making plans to write my dissertation. I wanted to look into the Colored Farmers Alliance, a branch of the populist movement active in the 1880s and 1890s, when the whites-only Farmers Alliance would not take them in. The Alliance offered collective resistance to Jim Crow and struggled to keep farmers on the land. I was motivated by C. Vann Woodward, not by anything he said to me directly, but by his assessment of the work that needed to be done if we want to understand the twentieth-century South—a study that’s gone missing to this day. But my plans changed when I met an incredible old man in Alabama, a man of heroic deeds and physical stature who had spent most of his life walking behind a mule in a cotton field. His name was Ned Cobb, and except for twelve years that he served in prison, he was a tenant farmer in rural Alabama.

My girlfriend, Dale, had decided to write her senior thesis for Harvard on an obscure organization called the Sharecroppers Union. Dale was a student of labor history and had worked as a volunteer labor organizer in Boston. She was choosing between investigating a defunct shoemakers’ union in New Hampshire and a farmers’ union in the deep South. We both felt that we had missed out on something by not joining friends who had gone to Mississippi and Alabama on voting-rights drives in the mid-1960s. So she chose Alabama, and I was her driver. She spent a week digging around in newspaper morgues and old-timey courthouses for information—stories, clippings, affidavits—on the shootout and trial of union members who had stood up against foreclosure in 1931. We had the address of a man who had been a key figure in the battle—that was Ned—and one cold morning in December 1968 we set out to find him. We came up to a cabin set back from the road; the mailbox said this was the place. We got out of the car, and we could see a man sizing us up from the veranda of the house. He held up his right hand and said, “I always recognize my people when I see them, children. Come on in, come on in.”

We did. We walked up to the house and went in, and all the nervousness of being two Massachusetts kids in Alabama in the 1960s melted away. We sat down with Ned opposite the blazing hearth—it was a very cold day. It happened that this was the house of his brother L.G. Cobb and L.G.’s wife, Glennie, and they took seats with us. Dale asked Ned one question. She asked him why he joined the Sharecroppers Union, and he spoke for eight hours without stopping. He never answered the question, of course, but he told a day of stories about what life was like for a man of his race and class that would move him to join such a union if he had the chance. He never took a break—Glennie served us two meals, the day came and went. We got up, it was dark out, and we were shaking. We were shaking because with all our years of higher education we had never been in the presence of a person who had such command of the English language. We left, we didn’t have a tape recorder at the time, and driving away Dale wrote down what she could remember from Ned’s conversation. She went on to use Ned’s testimony in her thesis on the Sharecroppers Union, which is now an underground classic and an artifact of two movements—the one of the 1930s and its follow-up in the 1960s.

Two years later I returned to Alabama, rented an old Pullman railway car that had been converted into a one-man house, a lovely little place, bright and airy, in Jackson’s Gap, and recorded Ned Cobb’s life story. The first day, we were sitting out on the porch of his tool shed behind his house, him whittling white oak splints to make a basket—he was a master basket maker—and me holding the microphone coming from my fancy tape recorder. I had prepared a hundred pages of questions, single-spaced, to cover the gamut of a cotton farmer’s life, the exterior life, crops and mules, landlords and boll weevils, mortgages and notes, the church and the division of labor at home, categories a bit too tidy and bloodless. I said to myself, “Well, how should we start?” I decided to start at the crucial time when Ned was twenty-one years old, just married and out from under his father’s rule, starting life as a sharecropper. I said, “Okay, let’s start in 1906.” “NINETEEN-OUGHT-SIX,” he affirmed, pounding his knee for emphasis. And he spoke until the batteries in the machine ran down. He never spoke about 1905 or 1907, strictly 1906. He had structured his memories around where he had lived, who his landlord was, how much cotton he raised and what he got paid for it, the name and character traits of his mule, which child had been born into his family that year. I sat there thinking, “My God, I’m not getting to ask my questions. What am I going to do?” I devised a method on the run. I would go back to my place, listen to the tapes and then bring them to him, and he would listen and fill in the gaps and correct himself. It was time-consuming but effective, and the method, if you can call it that, achieved what anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “thick description.”

My ignorance encouraged Ned to explain himself at length because he knew I didn’t know. Ned’s brother, L.G., who was still actively farming, went out of his way not only to identify his crops but to name the weeds. One afternoon I drove up to L.G.’s place and found no one at home. Going to look for him and Glennie in the vegetable garden, I caught sight of four people leisurely walking along freshly plowed rows maybe eighty yards from me. Two women were leading two men, the women appearing to curtsey every few feet, the men poking in rhythm at the ground with their walking sticks. They were planting sweet potatoes. The women would drop the slips at intervals and the men would follow closely behind and stick the root ends into the earth. I took off running across the field with my notebook in one hand and my tape recorder flapping like some flightless bird against my side. With sword and buckler I ran—why in the world didn’t I leave this baggage in the car? I stopped short because with every unseeing step I was mashing down the pretty green shoot of a plant I did not recognize. L.G.’s team stopped to watch me. Here a skip, there a leap—the little green devils seemed determined to trip me. Finally, I reached them. We shook hands, and they went on with their task. I felt heavy-footed but giddy, cured of my first anxiety: would they welcome me? After a minute, no more, L.G. asked me what I was doing hopping out there like a rabbit. I said I was avoiding stepping on the plants. “What plants are those?” he asked, kindly. The field hadn’t been planted yet. I was stepping over cockleburs, the spiny nemesis of cultivated fields. Oh, they had a big laugh, “stepping over weeds the boy is!”

When Dale and I decided to move south, we had no job prospects or firm idea of what we were searching for. We knew we wanted to see another part of the world, without leaving the country, but we had no idea how long we would stay. Our parents were perplexed. I had a new Ph.D. “What are you going to do,” Dale’s father asked us, “open a philosophy shop?” Well, it struck us as not a bad idea, and it turns out, it’s more or less what we have done. I continue to collect stories. Discovering the stories embedded in objects such as sweetgrass baskets and silver kuddush cups is at the core of Dale’s work. I am moved by two convictions that I feel more strongly than ever. The first is that my profession must be of some service to my community, and the second is something I heard Chaz Joyner say, and I’ve never heard anyone say it better: “We are closer to the beginning of what there is to know about slavery than to the end.” I would apply this wisdom to my current field of study and what there is to know about the Holocaust. Or the Glorious Revolution, in 1680, or all the glorious and inglorious revolutions since.

In 2008 the American Scholar ran an essay by novelist and philosopher Charles Johnson called “The End of the Black Narrative.” Johnson’s award-winning novel Middle Passage is rooted in that old narrative, but at the same time the consciousness of the main character points the way to a deeper understanding of slavery. Now the wraps are completely off. It’s time for change. Johnson argues that the old group narratives have lost their authority as tools of interpretation. They sound tired and trite. Black Americans need new stories. Irish Americans and the Irish in Ireland need new stories. The Irish and German workers who dominated the working class in Charleston in 1850 need new stories. Jewish people need new stories. God knows, the old stories will not sustain us in the new century.

Well, that’s very good news for the profession of history. There’s a ton of work to be done. The point was driven home to me last year with the publication in 2010 of Ira Berlin’s The Making of African America. Berlin had written a fabulous book called Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South, and a lot of it takes place in Charleston, which he evokes with the detail of a portrait artist. Then he spent many years sorting and editing the Freedmen’s Bureau Papers in Washington and producing other interpretive books.

So, Ira gave a talk at an NPR station—in Baltimore, I think—and it is a story he has been telling for decades, the saga of Africans in America, starting in the seventeenth-century forts on Africa’s Atlantic coast, where so many thousands of people torn from their homes and families were sold to European slavers and shipped to the New World. When the survivors of the voyage disembarked, they faced lives of oppression that did not end with slavery. And so the struggle for human rights and civil rights continues to this day.

When Ira finished his gig and was about to leave, a group of people who work at the station—people of color—came up to him and said, “Very good, Mr. Berlin. But this story has nothing to with us, nothing to do with me.” Ira asked them where they were from, and there was a man from Haiti, a woman from Nigeria, another person from Africa, and another from the West Indies. “We don’t know anything about ‘chitlins’ and grits, we grew up eating injera and listening to Neway Debebe or Nemours Jean Baptiste.”

Ira went home and thought about what he had heard. He did some research and learned that since 1965, when a new immigration law did away with individual country quotas, more people of African descent have entered the United States than arrived in all the years of the slave trade. Ira went ahead and wrote a new history structured around the various African migrations—forced migrations from abroad under very different circumstances, internal migrations most notably from south to north, and the ongoing immigration that is changing the composition of American schools and the work force. The new narrative places the stories of blacks next to the stories of whites. It is not meant to replace the old narrative and its trajectory toward freedom, but rather to broaden the story of American assimilation discerned by Oscar Handlin sixty years ago. Its newness consists of its inclusiveness. Handlin, incidentally, gave testimony to Congress that was instrumental in ending the old discriminatory immigration quotas.

The method of comparative history may spark insight into the nature of the Holocaust as well, not as a mysterious event that happened outside of history but as a genocide—yes, unparalleled in scope, tenacity, and use of lethal technology—in harmony with a long line of population losses and die-offs within the Western tradition. One small example: I gave a talk in Chapel Hill last year on links between German colonialism in Africa around 1900 and German aims and practice in conquered eastern Poland and Ukraine in 1941 and 1942. I asked, “What do we find if we juxtapose these two colonial projects?” For one thing, we find German doctors visiting the first German concentration camp, on Shark Island, off the coast of present-day Namibia, not for the purpose of healing the sick but to photograph starving children. Forty years later, another generation of German doctors entered the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos and photographed Jewish children in various stages of starvation. In 1942, when the SS was wanting to set up large cotton estates in conquered Ukraine, they brought in an outfit called the Togo Cotton Company, a relic of Germany’s African adventure, to organize operations—a company that had sent its managers to the United States to study American cotton plantations.

And so we keep coming back; we’re nearer to the beginning than to the end. Soon we will get to the starting line, and when we get there we’ll find Chaz Joyner waiting for us.

We rented an old house on Dupre Road in McClellanville, a gem of a fishing village set in the center of hundreds of thousands of acres of protected land—the Francis Marion Forest to the west and south, the Santee Coastal Reserve to the north, Cape Romain’s Class-A Wilderness to the east. To our surprise, we discovered a community of like-minded people—the Vietnam War and marijuana were the great levelers. We also found intellectual affinities with natives such as Jeannie and Chaz Joyner, and Genevieve Peterkin.

In the spring of our first year in McClellanville, two new friends and I organized the McClellanville Arts Council and proposed as our project a summer children’s workshop. The town council offered support; then, realizing we intended to recruit black students as well as white, they withdrew it. Visions of burning crosses danced in my head. I hit the Jack Daniels, and the first day of the workshop I arrived with some trepidation when I saw two men approaching with boxes of silkscreened T-shirts they had made for the children. And I thought, “Wow! This is great. It’s going to work.” They put down the boxes and took out these beautiful red T-shirts and silkscreened on the front was an image of Karl Marx. Sara Graham, who was on the little board of the arts council, took me aside and whispered, “Don’t worry. It looks just like Beethoven. Nobody will know.” Her husband, Tommy, and his co-conspirator, Billy Baldwin, are now among our closest friends.

I have to say, Ted’s and my careers have been shaped by accidental encounters, being in the right place at the right time. He found the book that became Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter on the dusty shelves of the South Carolina Historical Society, courtesy of David Moltke-Hansen, and produced a brilliant biography and plantation journal, an award-winning book.

In 1984, the sa...