Ira Berlin, noted UMD slavery historian
Ira Berlin, a longtime faculty member at the University of Maryland and a prize-winning historian revered for his groundbreaking scholarship into slavery and life during its aftermath, died Tuesday at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington. He was 77.
Through his books and through the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, based at the University of Maryland, Dr. Berlin helped unearth countless documents on the horrors, heroism and complexities of black life in the U.S. and the colonial era.
He explored everything from the relationship between masters and their former slaves to the long history of slavery predating the rise of the American South.
In a 2004 interview with the History News Network, he called slavery central to American history.
“It’s not a very happy or pleasant subject. It’s not something that one gets over it,” he said. “One does not get over history, one just has to come to terms with it.”
Dr. Berlin was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, receiving a Ph.D. in history in 1970. His books included “Generations of Captivity,” “Slaves Without Masters” and “Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America,” for which he won the Bancroft Prize.
He also wrote the introduction for a tie-in book to the acclaimed movie “12 Years a Slave,” and was an adviser for HBO's documentary about former slaves, “Unchained Memories.”
A press release from the university announcing his death said that Dr. Berlin served as dean of undergraduate studies from 1992 to 1994, and was dean of the College of Arts and Humanities in 1995 and 1996. From 1998 to 2001 he was co-director of the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora.
The university also noted that he had been awarded the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal by Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research in 2014, and in 2015 he won the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction.
He also received the university’s William Kirwan Undergraduate Education Award, recognizing contributions to undergraduate education.
Dr. Berlin “was one of the leading advocates in the five-year campaign to create UMD’s Frederick Douglass memorial on Hornbake Plaza, which was unveiled in November 2015,” the university stated in its release. “Berlin called Douglass ‘the most important Marylander who ever lived,’ and felt strongly that the memorial should be a sacred place where students could reflect on the history of slavery and emancipation and the importance of education.”
Numerous peers and former students offered tributes. Annette Gordon-Reed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Hemingses of Monticello,” tweeted that Dr. Berlin was a “great historian, and a good man.” Author and historian Ana Lucia Araujo wrote in a tweet that he influenced “at least three generations of scholars of slavery.”
Dr. Berlin once summed up his work by writing: “History is not about the past; it is about arguments we have about the past. And because it is about arguments that we have, it is about us.”
According to the university, Dr. Berlin is survived by his wife, Martha Berlin; a son, Richard Berlin, executive director of DREAM, an organization working with inner-city youth; daughter Dr. Lisa Berlin Wittenstein, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore; and three grandchildren.
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