Berlin's work is concerned with what he termed the "striking diversity" in African-American life under slavery. He argues that this diversity is especially evident with attention to the differences in African-American life under slavery across geography and time.[3] In his 1998 book Many Thousands Gone, which covers the history of North American slavery through the 18th century, Berlin differentiates among four regions and their respective forms of slavery: the Chesapeake, the
Lowcountry of South Carolina and
Georgia, the
Lower Mississippi Valley, and the North. He further differentiates each of these regions across three distinct "generations," emphasizing shifts over time. Berlin argues that geographic and temporal differences in the first two centuries of North American slavery had important consequences for African American culture and society.
Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1974)
ISBN978-1-59558-173-0 Tells the story of the free black men and women who lived in the South before the Civil War.
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (1982) Selections from the holdings of the National Archives; series one, volume three, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South, edited by Ira Berlin,
Thavolia Glymph, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland and Julie Saville.
^Ira Berlin, "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America," American Historical Review, Vol. 85, No. 1, (Feb.1980). Quotation on 45.