Ira Berlin

Professor Ira Berlin is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. He is an expert on slavery and emancipation in the Americas. Moreover, he has researched the larger Atlantic world in the 18th and 19th centuries and the term, "striking diversity" in African American life under slavery. He is also the author of "Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slavery," "Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America," and "Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South", which have led to prestigious awards such as the Beveridge Award, Bancroft Prize, Abraham Lincoln Prize, J. Franklin Jameson Prize of the American Historical Association, and Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award. Berlin has provided a significant amount of his career to documentaries such as the PBS-broadcast documentary "Prince Among Slaves" and the HBO film, "Unchained Memories". He is the founder of the Freedman and Southern Society Project and is the past president of the Organization of American Historians in 2002.