Ira Berlin is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland in College Park, where he lives. He is the author of Many Thousands Gone, Generations of Captivity, and Slaves Without Masters (The New Press). He co-edited Remembering Slavery (with Marc Favreau and Steven F. Miller), Families and Freedom (with Leslie S. Rowland), and Slavery in New York (with Leslie M. Harris), all published by The New Press. His books have won the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Abraham Lincoln Prize, among many other awards.Leslie Harris is a professor of history at Emory University and is the author of In the Shadow of Slavery.

"[Berlin's] Many Thousands Gone is likely to remain for years to come the standard account of the first two centuries of slavery in the area that became the United States." - London Review of Books; "Berlin has given us a moving, insightful account of slavery in the United States. Readers will not soon forget the story he has told, nor should they." - New York Times; "Berlin's study is the best account we have of the beginnings of servitude in America." - Times Literary Supplement; "[Harris's] in the Shadow of Slavery... is a big and ambitious book, one in which insights about race and class in New York City abound. Leslie Harris has masterfully brought more than two centuries of African American history back to life in this illuminating new work; - David Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness; "Berlin, one of the foremost historians of American slavery, has written an addition to the canon of essential works on the subject." - Christian Science Monitor"