Umd Professor Wins Distinguished Service To The Humanities Award

ARHU’s Distinguished University Professor Ira Berlin honored at the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C.

ARHU’s Distinguished University Professor Ira Berlin honored at the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C.
Berlin was granted a 2011 Distinguished Service to the Humanities Award for increasing national awareness of some of Washington's greatest achievements in our current creative culture at Making D.C. Sizzle: A Celebration of Washington's Creative Innovators. Professor Ira Berlin, American History, is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, and a past President of the Organization of American Historians. His first book, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South, was awarded the Best First Book Prize by the National Historical Society. In 1999, Berlin authored the groundbreaking study Many Thousands Gone: the first two centuries of slavery in America, which challenged the monolithic view of American slavery as plantation-based, Southern, and Christian. After decades of studying and documenting first hand narratives of the slave experience, Berlin argued that African Americans' lives were as varied and changing as the world in which they lived. Berlin's work documenting the slave experience continues at the University of Maryland as the Freedmen and Southern Society Project.