WHAT: DC Courts’ Black History Month event 
 
WHERE: Jurors’ Lounge – Room 3300 Moultrie Courthouse, 500 Indiana Avenue, NW 
 
WHEN: Friday, February 27th   Noon to 2 PM 
 
WHO: Dr. Ira Berlin, Professor of U.S History, University of Maryland 
 
Dr. Ira Berlin has written extensively on American history, 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.  Dr. Berlin is the founder of the Freedmen and the Southern Society Project.  The project’s multi-volume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation has won the Prize for Excellence in Civil War studies by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute of Gettysburg College. Other prize-winning books by Dr. Berlin include Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Mainland North America and Generations of Captivity: A History of Slaves in the United States.  Dr. Berlin is also is one of the editors of recordings of the recollections of former slaves entitled Remembering Slavery:  African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation.  For those who are interested in military history, he is a co-author of Freedom’s Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War. 
 
Dr. 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 has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 
 
Dr. Berlin will welcome questions about any aspect of slavery and emancipation.