Ira Berlin

Ira Berlin (born 1941) is an American historian, a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, and a past President of the Organization of American Historians. Berlin is the author of such books as "Many Thousands Gone" and "Generations of Captivity".

He has written extensively on American history and the larger Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Berlin has focused in particular on the history of slavery. His first book, "Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South", was awarded the Best First Book Prize by the National Historical Society. [ [http://www.history.umd.edu/Bio/berlin.html Ira Berlin] , University of Maryland, Department of History]

Berlin has long been concerned with studying what he termed the "striking diversity" in African-American life under slavery--a diversity which, he argues, is especially evident when one is attentive to differences over space and time. [ Ira Berlin, "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America," "American Historical Review", Vol. 85, No. 1, (Feb.1980). Quotation on 45.] In his 1998 book "Many Thousands Gone" (which covers the history of North American slavery up through the 1700s), Berlin differentiates between four regions and their respective slave regimes: the Chesapeake, the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, the Lower Mississippi Valley, and the North. He then explores each of these regions in terms of three distinct "generations," thus emphasizing shifts over time. Berlin argues that geographic and temporal differences in the first two centuries of North American slavery had important consequences for African American culture and society.

References

elected Works

*"Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South" (New York: The New Press, 1974).
*"Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
*"Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

ee also

*Organization of American Historians
*History of slavery

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NAME=Berlin, Ira
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SHORT DESCRIPTION=Contemporary U. S. slavery historian
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PLACE OF BIRTH=United States
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