Ira Berlin

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Ira Berlin (b. 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.^[1]

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.^[2] 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.

[edit] References

1. ^ Ira Berlin, University of Maryland, Department of History
2. ^ 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.

[edit] Selected 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).

[edit] See also

• Organization of American Historians
• History of slavery

Persondata
NAME	Berlin, Ira
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Contemporary U. S. slavery historian
DATE OF BIRTH
PLACE OF BIRTH	United States
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH