Berlin wrote the books Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998) and Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (2003).

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.

The project's multi-volume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation has twice been awarded the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for the History of the Federal Government, as well as the J. Franklin Jameson Prize of the American Historical Association for outstanding editorial achievement (October, 1999).

In 2007, he was an advising scholar for the award-winning PBS documentary Prince Among Slaves, produced by Unity Productions Foundation.