Learned late yesterday about the passing of Ira Berlin. I only had the pleasure of meeting him a few times, but he was one of those rare scholars whose body of work, from the first book to the last, profoundly shaped the entire field of slavery studies.
A refresher course/bibliography, for those unfamiliar with Ira Berlin's contributions. To begin, "Slaves without Masters" (1974), a study of free black southerners. 1/ 
Berlin was a founder of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, a documentary history of emancipation over 40 years old, whose four published volumes were all co-edited by Berlin & whose contribution to scholarship and scholar training is unparalleled. 2/
Berlin co-edited several influential collections, including "Slavery & Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution" (1986) and "Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas" (1993) 3/
His masterwork was surely "Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America" (1998), which won the Bancroft Prize, the Douglass Prize, and many other awards. 4/
That was followed by "Generations of Captivity" (2003), which extended the story of "Many Thousands Gone" forward through the age of emancipation. 5/
In 2010, Berlin published "The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations," bringing the narrative right to the present. 6/
His final work, "The Long Emancipation" (2015), derived from the Huggins Lectures he delivered at Harvard, exploring that reality that freedom came only from struggle and as a process over time. 7/
I am quite sure that I'm missing some of Berlin's work and understating his contributions and output, but I hope others will flesh this out and tell us all what I've neglected. He was a giant in the field. 8/8
