University Times

Countless historians have addressed the subject of slavery in America. Very few historians, however, have looked at what effect the type of work slaves did had on their social and cultural life, and the development of African-American culture.

Among those who have tackled the subject is this year's E.P. Thompson Memorial lecturer Ira Berlin, professor of history at the University of Maryland and a co-editor of the recently published "Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom and the Civil War." Berlin will speak on "Rethinking African-American Slavery" on March 16 at 7:30 p.m. in Frick Fine Arts auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.

"He is a person of genuinely international reputation," says Marcus Rediker, a member of Pitt's history department and one of the organizers of the event. "The lecture comes out of a major new book of Berlin's on the history of slavery. This is a preview of what will be a blockbuster of a book." Inaugurated last year, the E.P. Thompson lecture series is sponsored by the Pittsburgh Center for Social History and the Working-Class History Seminar. It honors the late social historian Edward P. Thompson, who taught at Pitt in 1975.

The Pittsburgh Center for Social History is a joint project of Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University and Carlow College. The Working-Class History Seminar is sponsored by Pitt's English, history, political science, religious studies and sociology departments, the cultural studies program, Africana studies, the Honors College, the law school, Western European studies program and women's studies program.

CMU sponsors include the history and English departments, and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

In addition to co-editing "Free at Last," Berlin is the author of "Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South," which was awarded the Best First Book Prize by the National Historical Society in 1975.

He also is a founder and former director of the Freedman and Southern Society Project, a multi-volume series of primary documents on slavery with interpretive essays, published under the title "Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation." "It is basically documents of the Freedman's Bureau, which is the way in which the North dealt with reconstruction in the South," says Rediker. "It is a wonderfully rich set of sources, including a lot of documents written by freed people themselves. We very rarely find documents written by common folk themselves, especially people who were slaves." According to Rediker, "Freedom" has been an enormously successful series. The four volumes published so far all have been reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Review of Books and the series has won the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government, the J. Franklin Jameson Prize of the American Historical Association for outstanding editorial achievement, and the Abraham Lincoln Prize of the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute of Gettysburg College for excellence in Civil War studies.

Eric Foner, president of the Organization of American Historians, has said that the Freedman and Southern Society Project is likely to be looked back on as the current generation's most significant effort to deal with the American past.

Berlin is currently a professor of history and dean of undergraduates at the University of Maryland.

–Mike Sajna