When Ira Berlin was growing up in the Bronx, he knew Van Cortlandt Park as a leafy attraction of that northern borough of New York City.
"What I didn't know was that it was probably once Van Cortlandt plantation and that there were slaves living and working there," says Berlin, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park.
"There are probably many things I don't remember that I was taught in New York's public schools, but I very much doubt that was part of the curriculum," he says.
Berlin, 64, is trying to change that. For decades he has researched parts of slavery's history that were often overlooked. Now he has helped organize the exhibit Slavery in New York that opened at the New York Historical Society this month, telling the surprising tale of the vital importance of slaves in the history of the country's most important city.
"Probably the most exciting thing for me about this exhibit is that we are taking all the new scholarship on slavery and making it available to a larger audience," Berlin says of the well-received exhibit that will be at the society's building on Central Park West until March 5. "Very few people walk out of that exhibit not saying, `This makes me think differently about this city.'"
Berlin, who also co-edited the exhibit's catalog with Leslie Harris of Emory University, is considered one of the nation's pre-eminent scholars of slavery. In 1999, he published the groundbreaking Many Thousands Gone, which looked at pre-19th-century slavery in the Americas, showing that the institution varied as the millions of Africans who came to the New World negotiated their way through its brutal, controlling mechanisms.
Berlin received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1970. His first book, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South, was published in 1975, the year he arrived at Maryland. He founded and directed the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, which published many volumes based on the papers of the federal government's Freedmen Bureau, which oversaw the concerns of freed slaves in the years after the Civil War.
Did you learn anything surprising about slavery in your hometown while working on this exhibit and catalog?
I knew quite a bit, or thought I did, but I learned quite a bit as well. It turns out there are three big stories here. This exhibit actually covers one of them. A second exhibit will cover the other two.
