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 African-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 from 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 at Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Center for Advanced Studies at Australian National University, and W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. He has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Arco 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), Cardozo Professor of History at Yale University, and Mellon Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois.

Ira Berlin has served on the Advisory Board of the National Archives, the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History, and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute. He has been a consultant to Ken Burns's "Civil War" documentary, the Smithsonian Institution, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the New York Historical Society. In 2000, President Clinton appointed Ira Berlin to the Advisory Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2002, he was inaugurated 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; the Frederick Douglass Prize by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute; the Owsley Prize by the Southern Historical Association, and the Rudwick Prize by the Organization of American Historians. Generations of Captivity: A History of Slaves in the United States (2002) has been awarded the Albert Beveridge Prize by the American Historical Association and the Ansfield Wolf Award.

In 1999, the Humanities Council of Washington named Ira Berlin Outstanding Public Humanities Scholar of the Year. In 2002, Ira Berlin served as president of the Organization of American Historians and in 2004 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.