Ira Berlin
Ira Berlin was born in New York City in 1941. He attended New York public schools and the University of Wisconsin, where in 1970 he received a doctorate in history with high honors. He teaches at the University of Maryland, where he served as Dean of Undergraduates and Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities. He presently is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History. In 1990, he was appointed Distinguished Teacher-Scholar, and in 1991 the Maryland Association for Higher Education named him the state's Outstanding Educator.
Ira Berlin has written extensively on American history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly on Southern and Afro-American life. His first book, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1975) won the Best First Book Prize awarded by the National Historical Society. Berlin is the founder of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which he directed until 1991. The project's multi-volume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation (1982, 1985, 1990, 1993) has twice been awarded the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government as well as the J. Franklin Jameson Prize of the American Historical Association for outstanding editorial achievement, and the Abraham Lincoln Prize for excellence in Civil-War studies of the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute of Gettysburg College. His articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Negro History, William and Mary Quarterly, and other popular and scholarly periodicals.
Ira Berlin has held fellowships at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center
for Historical Studies in Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Studies
in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, and the Center for Advanced
Studies at Australian National University. He has been awarded grants
by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation,
the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Historical Publication and
Records Commission, and the University of Maryland. He was Bi-Centennial
Professor (Fulbright) at Centre de Recherche sur l'Histoire des Etats-Unis,
Universite Paris VII (Institut D'Anglais Charles V) and Cardozo Professor
of History at Yale University. He is presently a Guggenheim fellow.
Ira Berlin has served on the Advisory Board of the National Archives,
the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, and is currently chair of
the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History. He
has been a consultant to Ken Burns' "Civil War" documentary
and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1999, the Humanities Council of
Washington named Ira Berlin Outstanding Public Humanities Scholar of
the Year. The following year President Clinton appointed him to the
Advisory Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2002
2003, he served as president of the Organization of American Historians.
With other members of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, Ira Berlin is a co-editor of Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (1992) and Families and Freedom (1996), and Remembering Slavery: African-Americans Talk about their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation. His study of African-American life between 1619 and 1819, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Mainland North America was awarded the Bancroft Prize for the best book in American history by Columbia University; Frederick Douglass Prize by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute; Owsley Prize by the Southern Historical Association, and the Rudwick Prize by the Organization of American Historians. In 2003, Harvard University Press published his Generations of Captivity: A History of Slaves in the United States. The American Historical Association awarded it the Albert J. Beveridge Prize for the best book in the history of the Americas.
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