Teaching the History of Slavery and Emancipation in the United States and Latin America
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europe, Africa, and the Americas came together to create new societies and economies. Central to that new world history—perhaps the first true world history—was the institution of slavery, as slaves provided the labor force that drove this new international economy. Thereafter, no one was untouched by the institution of chattel bondage. Any study of world history must address the institution of slavery, not only for its social and economic importance but also as a moral rupture that has not healed. What is true for the world is most certainly true for the United States. For most of American history, the United States was a slave society. Understanding slavery is critical to understanding American life. Perhaps for that reason, the history—meaning the changing nature—of slavery has been subjected to intensive investigation during the last generation. Over time and in different places, the slave experience changed radically. Understanding that—after all change is history’s essence—is critical to understanding slavery. Slavery is also ground zero for American race relations. Like slavery, race—the meaning of whiteness and blackness—changed over time. How and why it changed is also of critical importance. Finally, slavery does not exist only in history; it also exists in memory. Memory is profoundly different from history. It is the memory of slavery as much as its history that stirs recent studies of slavery in American culture and society.
Speakers
Ira Berlin has written extensively on American history and the larger Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly the history of slavery. His first book, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1975) won the Best First Book Prize awarded by the National Historical Society. Berlin is the founding editor of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which he directed until 1991. The project's multi-volume Freedom: A Documentary history of Emancipation (1982, 1985, 1990, 1993) has twice been awarded the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government, as well as the J. Franklin Jameson Prize of the American Historical Association for outstanding editorial achievement, and the Abraham Lincoln Prize for excellence in Civil-War studies by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute of Gettysburg College. In 1999, his study of African-American life between 1619 and 1819, entitled Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Mainland North America was awarded the Bancroft Prize for the best book in American history by Columbia University; Frederick Douglass Prize by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute; Owsley Prize by the Southern Historical Association, and the Rudwick Prize by the Organization of American Historians. In 2002, Generations of Captivity: A History of Slaves in the United States was awarded the Albert Beveridge Prize by the American Historical Association and the Ansfield Wolf Award. Berlin has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Arco Foundation, the National Historical Publication and Records Commission, and the University of Maryland. He was Bi-Centennial Professor (Fulbright) at Centre de Recherche sur l'Histoire des Etats-Unis, Universite Paris VII (Institut D'Anglais Charles V), Cardozo Professor of History at Yale University, and Mellon Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois. In 2002, same year, he was inaugurated as president of the Organization of American Historians and in 2004 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
