Ira Berlin

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Ira Berlin (born May 27, 1941 in Queens , New York ; † June 5, 2018 ) was an American historian , who was best known for research on the history of slavery in the United States .

Life

Ira Berlin went to school in New York and then studied at the University of Wisconsin , which he graduated with a doctorate in 1970. He taught at the University of Maryland and was President of the Organization of American Historians in 2002/2003 . In 2004 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Berlin's research area was the history of the United States and the Atlantic world in the 18th and 19th centuries, especially the history of slavery . His first book on the subject - Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1975) - won the Organization of American Historians' Best First Book . Of particular interest to Berlin was the cultural inconsistency and diversity of Afro-American life under slavery, which becomes apparent as soon as regional and temporal differences are taken into account. The focus of Berlin's book Many Thousands Gone (1998) is therefore on four regions in which the history of slavery has progressed significantly differently: the Chesapeake region, the lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia , the Lower Mississippi Valley and the north . In order to describe the development of slavery in these regions, Berlin differentiated between different generations of slaves ( charter generations , plantation generations , revolution generations , migration generations ), which each differ markedly from one another. He continued this analysis in his book Generations of Captivity , published in 2003 , which received several awards.

Fonts (selection)

  • Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South , New Press, 2007 reissue, ISBN 1595581731
  • Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America , Belknap Press, 2000 reissue, ISBN 0674002113 ; awarded the 1999 Bancroft Prize
  • 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 , among others

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary , accessed June 7, 2018
  2. ↑ US historian Ira Berlin died at the age of 77 , deutschlandfunkkultur.de, published and accessed on June 7, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Berlin, Ira
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH 5th June 2018