Ira Berlin, Whose Work Upended Our Understanding Of Slavery In The U.S., Has Died At 77

Berlin persistently wrote about slavery’s varied effects across the years, but he never lost sight of the cruelty. “In books like Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1974) and Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998), Dr. Berlin, a longtime professor at the University of Maryland, upended simplistic notions of how slavery was practiced and what happened after it ended.”