Litwack has earned a worldwide reputation for historical scholarship in African American studies and as an enormously popular and influential teacher. His seminal work, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (Knopf, 1979), received the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1980 as well as an American Book Award in 1981 and the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize in 1980. His other major works include Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow ( Knopf, 1998), and North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States , 1790-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 1961), among others.

Litwack has taught at Berkeley for almost 40 years. He taught at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1958 to 1964 and also at the University of South Carolina, Louisiana

State University and the University of Mississippi. In addition, he's taken his teaching abroad to universities in Moscow, Beijing, Sydney and Helsinki.

The Becker Lectures in History series is the most important event sponsored by the Department of History. Now in its third decade, the series brings distinguished historians from all areas of specialization to Cornell for a series of lectures each year. It is named for Carl Becker, who taught at Cornell from 1917 until 1941, when he became the university's official historian.