Ira Berlin

Ira Berlin died on June 5, 2018. Berlin was a leading historian of southern and African American life and was a professor of history and former dean of the College of Arts & Humanities at the University of Maryland. He was also the founding director of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the National Archives, where he and his colleagues compiled millions of accounts of southern slaves and former slaveholders of early U.S. history, gathering the research material for the nine-volume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867. Berlin wrote or edited numerous other books on African American history, including Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation (2000), a book-and-tape set, which incorporates voices of former slaves.