Ira Berlin, Ph.D., died yesterday at the age of 77. Dr. Berlin, an historian, was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland; he specialized in the field of slavery. The Washington Post:

For nearly a century after the end of the Civil War, historians treated slavery as a “footnote or exception,” a side issue to the story of liberty in America, said Eric Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Scholars often viewed the institution in romantic terms, arguing that it benefited slaves as well as white plantation owners.

Dr. Berlin, along with historians such as David Brion Davis and Eugene D. Genovese, upended that picture, Foner said, and “really put the history of slavery at the center of our understanding of American history,” impacting everything from economics to culture. . . .

Ira Berlin intersects with MoscowID.net here: On November 8, 2003, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News published Dr. Berlin’s critique of Southern Slavery As It Was in a front-page story:

The question of context
Ira Berlin, an award-winning author and professor at the University of Maryland, said anyone with an opinion can find scraps of supporting evidence in historical documents. He said a good historian is compelled to examine things in the larger context.

“I would say this understanding of slavery is extremely anachronistic,” Berlin said of the pastors’ booklet. “All of the evidence that we have is that the slaves were extremely unhappy. The vast majority of the slaves wanted out and when they had the chance they got out. Slaveholders put forth this argument that slaves were the happiest people in the world.”

Wilson said abolitionists like Berlin take history out of context to paint the South as an evil empire and show that 100 percent of the slaves were beaten.

“What we say is that there were examples of gross mistreatment of slaves, but that there were also slaves who thought back on their time as slaves with affection for the people that they knew and loved,” Wilson said. “The point was not that those quotes represented 100 percent of the slave experience.”

Berlin has found ample evidence to prove slavery was a brutal system of control. He said there is far less documentation to support Wilson and Wilkins’ theory that slavery was benign, and slave owners were mostly good Christians.

Known for such works as “Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South” and “Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Mainland North America,” Berlin has received the Bancroft Prize for the best book in American history from Columbia University. “Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation,” which Berlin directed through the Freedom and Southern Society Project, twice received the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government, the J. Franklin Jamison Prize of the American Historical Association, and The Abraham Lincoln Prize for excellence in Civil War studies.

“(Wilson and Wilkins) haven’t done the fundamental work of historians,” Berlin said. “It’s not a question of what sources to use. You should use all the sources you can. If they wanted to reference confederates and plantation owners, they could have cited the planters’ defense of slavery, the plantation records . . . receipts from the sales of slaves. Instead they found one scrap of evidence to support their opinion. That tells us a lot about what they’re defending.”

To remind you, Southern Slavery As It Was stands as Douglas Wilson’s greatest literary accomplishment to date because it is the only “monograph” that he co-wrote, edited, and published. Further, it is Mr. Wilson’s first known foray into plagiarism, which has reached kleptomaniac proportions. And it’s important to note that Doug Wilson has never retracted one word of SSAIW; he “still agree[s] with everything in it.”

Dr. Ira Berlin, rest in peace.

HT: Ana Lucia Araujo