Ira Berlin (1941-2018)

On June 5, 2018, labor studies lost a lion with the passing of Ira Berlin. As the outpouring of grief and remembrance on social media in the hours following news of his death made clear, Ira was far more than an astonishingly productive and influential scholar of African American working-class history; he extended the insights of W.E.B. Du Bois for a later historiographical generation as much as anyone. He was our mentor, our muse, our friend, and our guide. He crafted his students even as he helped to usher African American history into mainstream intellectual life. No one could pass through Ira's orbit without being profoundly and forever touched by his wit and his wisdom. He took everyone under his wing—shy undergraduates, cocky graduate students, and on at least one memorable occasion, a neighborhood kid deep in the throes of a National History Day project. None of us were too small for one of our greatest intellects to miss. We all counted.

And we all learned from our encounters. Ira was as swift to offer advice on child-rearing as he was to scold us for excesses in our writing and flaws in our thinking. Weasel words were the worst and woe be to those who tacked on a more without explaining "more than what?" He read our roughest drafts and paid us enormous respect when he invited us to read his. He welcomed us into his ridiculously crowded office in Francis Scott Key Hall at the University of Maryland. In Ira's academy, scholarship was a team sport—and often a contact sport. Ideas were meant to be poked, probed, unpacked, and repacked. Thick skins were required attire. He was famed for asking trenchant questions that in their deceptive simplicity had the power to shift our historical understandings along wholly new paths. "Where did these ideas come from?" he scrawled in the margin of a dissertation that presumed to untangle the gendered ideologies of a recently freed people. More than two decades later, I am still working out a plausible answer.

That Ira recognized the worth in all of us and gave so freely to help us identify and then develop our talents is a direct reflection of his scholarly interests. Ira made a career of studying the poorest and most oppressed among us: the millions who lived out, or at least started, their lives in chains. Whether examining the first days of slavery or its last, Ira saw the people behind the violence, the pain, and the trauma of chattel bondage. He saw mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, friends, enemies, and rebels. Most of all, Ira saw a black working class. As he explained in Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, which received the Bancroft Prize, "The stench of slavery's moral rot cannot disguise the design of American captivity: the extraction of labor that allowed a small group of men to dominate all." But no domination was ever complete. By recognizing enslaved Americans (and freedpeople after them) as instrumental contributors to the nation's social, political, and productive life, Ira illuminated the humanity that slaveholders and later, white supremacists, had hoped to extinguish. It was a cognitive shift that revealed the shortcomings of abstractions that had long governed our thinking about slavery's grim history: of resistance and accommodation, of paternalism, of absolute alienation, of sambos, and of social death. African Americans emerged from Ira's mind as fully-vested actors on history's stage—complex, contradictory and always ambitious for a world without bondage. As Ira taught us, slaves as laborers left their imprint on slavery even as slavery made them, and when the time came, and the guns erupted in April, 1861, enslaved Americans just as determinedly remade the nation. Power, we learned through Ira's work, resides in many and often unexpected locations.

This is the gift that our dearly missed colleague leaves us: a reimagining of the past that recognizes that we all have something to offer, and that no matter how great the odds that stand in our way, we will...