History Professor Berlin Takes Home Honors

 Ira Berlin wins the Organization of American Historians’ Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award.

 Ira Berlin wins the Organization of American Historians’ Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award.
Congratulations to Distinguished University Professor Ira Berlin who won this year’s Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award. Since 2008, the award has honored individuals whose contributions have significantly enriched the understanding and appreciation of American history. 
 Berlin received the award at a ceremony during the 105th annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Wisconsin on April 21 where President Alice Kessler-Harris commented:
 “One of our foremost historians, Ira Berlin has reframed and reinterpreted the history of slavery in North America.  “Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America,” and its companion volume, “Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves,” chart not only slavery’s regional diversity and its transformation over three centuries but also the sustained resistance of enslaved and free African Americans and the crucial role they played in undermining the system.
 Awarded the Bancroft, the Beveridge, the Rudwick, the Owsley, and the Frederick Douglass Prizes, these magisterial volumes have changed fundamentally the way we conceptualize slavery and its impact. The Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which Berlin founded and directed for fifteen years, and its multivolume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, have made available a previously unknown wealth of evidence with which we now ground our teaching and research in African American emancipation. In seven other coedited volumes, Ira has brought to the fore dimensions of African American experience ranging from military service in the Civil War to African American kinship.
 A former president of the Organization of American Historians, Berlin has a multifaceted record of service. A former member of the Advisory Board of the National Archives and the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C., he has been a consultant for the Smithsonian Institution, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the New-York Historical Society. He has also served on the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities. With the Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award, we honor the depth and range of the contributions Ira Berlin has made for nearly four decades.”