Ira Berlin

Ira Berlin ( b. 1941 in New York) is an American historian who has emerged particularly through research on the history of slavery in the United States.

Life

Ira Berlin has gone to school in New York and has subsequently studied at the University of Wisconsin, where he graduated in 1970 with a doctorate. He teaches at the University of Maryland and was the 2002-03 president of the Organization of American Historians.

Berlin's research area is the history of the United States and the Atlantic world in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly the history of slavery. His first book on the subject - Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1975 ) - won the Best First Book of the Organization of American Historians. Of particular interest is the cultural heterogeneity and diversity of African American life under slavery, clearly emerges when regional and temporal differences are taken into account for Berlin. At the heart of Berlin's book Many Thousands Gone ( 1998) therefore there are four regions in which the history of slavery is each extend substantially different: the Chesapeake region, the lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia, the Lower Mississippi Valley and the north. To describe the evolution of slavery in these regions differs Berlin several slave generations ( charter generations, plantation generations, Revolution generations, migration generations), which differ significantly in each case. In his book published in 2002 Generations of Captivity, which received several awards, he continues this analysis.

Writings

  • Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South, New Press, new edition 2007, ISBN 1595581731
  • Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Belknap Press, new edition 2000, ISBN 0674002113
  • Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era, New Press, 1998, ISBN 1565844408
  • Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American slaves, Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-674-01061-2, awarded the Anisfield - Wolf Book Award
University of Wisconsin System Chesapeake Bay Georgia (U.S. state) Union (American Civil War) Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Integrated Authority File
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