Emancipation'S Long Foreshadowing

Ira Berlin visits Harvard for a three-day lecture series and wins the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal.

By Corydon Ireland, Harvard Gazette.

Ira Berlin, a pre-eminent historian of African America who is now in his 70s, visited Harvard this week, both to give (lectures) and to receive (an award).

Berlin, who teaches at the University of Maryland, delivered the lectures on “The Long Emancipation” for the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

But the award, the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal for 2014, took him by surprise. On Tuesday, Berlin was poised to deliver the first of three days of lectures in this year’s Nathan I. Huggins series when center director Henry Louis Gates Jr.popped the news in front of a standing-room-only crowd.

“His books are required reading,” said Gates, who added that one had “changed my life”: “Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South” (1974). That was Berlin’s first book, and it turned Civil War history on its head. By using census data, he showed that by 1860 more freed blacks lived in the slaveholding South than in the slave-free North. “He did it,” said Gates, “by using numbers in plain sight.”

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