In this broad-ranging book, the preeminent authority on the history of slavery meditates on the orgins, experience, and legacy of this "peculiar institution." David Brion Davis begins with a substantial and highly personal introduction in which he discusses some of the major ideas and individuals that have shaped his approach to history. He then presents a series of interlocking essays that cover topics including slave resistance, the historical construction of race, and the connections between the abolitionist movement and the struggle for women's rights. The book also includes essays on such major figures as Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as appreciations of two of the finest historians of the twentieth century: C. Vann Woodward and Eugene D. Genovese. Gathered together for the first time, these essays present the major intellectual, historical, and moral issues essential to the study of New World slavery and its devastating legacy. Book jacket.
David Brion Davis's books on the history of slavery reflect some of the most distinguished and influential thinking on the subject to appear in the past generation. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, the sequel to Davis's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and the second volume of a proposed trilogy, is a truly monumental work of historical scholarship that first appeared in 1975 to critical acclaim both academic and literary. This reprint of that important work includes a new preface by the author, in which he situates the book's argument within the historiographic debates of the last two decades.
First published in 1979, this volume offers students and teachers a unique view of American history prior to the Civil War. Distinguished historian David Brion Davis has chosen a diverse array of primary sources that show the actual concerns, hopes, fears, and understandings of ordinary antebellum Americans. He places these sources within a clear interpretive narrative that brings the documents to life and highlights themes that social and cultural historians have brought to our attention in recent years. Beginning with the family and the issue of socialization and influence, the units move on to struggles over access to wealth and power; the plight of &"outsiders&" in an &"open&" society; and ideals of progress, perfection, and mission. The reader of this volume hears a great diversity of voices but also grasps the unities that survived even the Civil War.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award 2014 With this volume, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history. Bringing to a close his staggeringly ambitious, prizewinning trilogy on slavery in Western culture Davis offers original and penetrating insights into what slavery and emancipation meant to Americans. He explores how the Haitian Revolution respectively terrified and inspired white and black Americans, hovering over the antislavery debates like a bloodstained ghost. He offers a surprising analysis of the complex and misunderstood significance the project to move freed slaves back to Africa. He vividly portrays the dehumanizing impact of slavery, as well as the generally unrecognized importance of freed slaves to abolition. Most of all, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.
Homicide has many social and psychological implications that vary from culture to culture and which change as people accept new ideas concerning guilt, responsibility, and the causes of crime. A study of attitudes toward homicide is therefore a method of examining social values in a specific setting. Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860 is the first book to contrast psychological assumptions of imaginative writers with certain social and intellectual currents in an attempt to integrate social attitudes toward such diverse subjects as human evil, moral responsibility, criminal insanity, social causes of crime, dueling, lynching, the "unwritten law" of a husband's revenge, and capital punishment. In addition to works of literary distinction by Cooper, Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe, among others, Davis considers a large body of cheap popular fiction generally ignored in previous studies of the literature of this period. This is an engrossing study of fiction as a reflection of and a commentary on social problems and as an influence shaping general beliefs and opinions.
Winner of several national awards including the 1967 Pulitzer Prize, this classic study by David Brion Davis has given new direction to the historical and sociological research of society's attitude towards slavery. Davis depicts the various ways different societies have responded to the intrinsic contradictions of slavery from antiquity to the early 1770's in order to establish the uniqueness of the abolitionists' response. While slavery has always caused considerable social and psychological tension, Western culture has associated it with certain religious and philosophical doctrines that gave it the highest sanction. The contradiction of slavery grew more profound when it became closely linked with American colonization, which had as its basic foundation the desire and opportunity to create a more perfect society. Davis provides a comparative analysis of slave systems in the Old World, a discussion of the early attitudes towards American slavery, and a detailed exploration of the early protests against Negro bondage, as well as the religious, literary, and philosophical developments that contributed to both sides in the controversies of the late eighteenth century. This exemplary introduction to the history of slavery in Western culture presents the traditions in thought and value that gave rise to the attitudes of both abolitionists and defenders of slavery in the late eighteenth century as well as the nineteenth century.
First published in 1979, this volume offers students and teachers a unique view of American history prior to the Civil War. Distinguished historian David Brion Davis has chosen a diverse array of primary sources that show the actual concerns, hopes, fears, and understandings of ordinary antebellum Americans. He places these sources within a clear interpretive narrative that brings the documents to life and highlights themes that social and cultural historians have brought to our attention in recent years. Beginning with the family and the issue of socialization and influence, the units move on to struggles over access to wealth and power; the plight of &"outsiders&" in an &"open&" society; and ideals of progress, perfection, and mission. The reader of this volume hears a great diversity of voices but also grasps the unities that survived even the Civil War.
A debate of intellectual significance and power. The implications of these essays extend far beyond antislavery, important as that subject undoubtedly is. This will be of major importance to students of historical method as well as the history of ideas and reform movements."--Carl N. Degler, Stanford University "The marrow of the most important historiographical controversy since the 1970s."--Michael Johnson, University of California, Irvine "A debate of intellectual significance and power. The implications of these essays extend far beyond antislavery, important as that subject undoubtedly is. This will be of major importance to students of historical method as well as the history of ideas and reform movements."--Carl N. Degler, Stanford University
For more than twenty years David Brion Davis has been recognized as a leading authority on the moral and ideological responses to slavery in the Western world. From Homicide to Slavery, Davis's first book of collected essays, brings together selections reflecting his wide-ranging interests in colonial history, Afro-American history, the social sciences, and American literature. The essays are interconnected by Davis's central concern with violence, irrationality, and the definition of moral limits during a period when Americans believed they were breaking free from historical constraints and acquiring new powers of self-perfection. Topics range from a socially revealing murder trial in 1843 to debates over capital punishment, movements of counter-subverison, the iconography of race, the cowboy as an American hero, the portrayal of violence in American literature, the historiography of slavery, and the British and American antislavery movements.
The marrow of the most important historiographical controversy since the 1970s."—Michael Johnson, University of California, Irvine "A debate of intellectual significance and power. The implications of these essays extend far beyond antislavery, important as that subject undoubtedly is. This will be of major importance to students of historical method as well as the history of ideas and reform movements."—Carl N. Degler, Stanford University
A new history of the abolition of the British slave trade “Easily the most scholarly, clear and persuasive analysis yet published of the rise to dominance of the British in the Atlantic slave trade—as well as the implementation of abolition when that dominance was its peak.”—David Eltis, co-author of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Parliament’s decision in 1807 to outlaw British slaving was a key moment in modern world history. In this magisterial work, historian David Richardson challenges claims that this event was largely due to the actions of particular individuals and emphasizes instead that abolition of the British slave trade relied on the power of ordinary people to change the world. British slaving and opposition to it grew in parallel through the 1760s and then increasingly came into conflict both in the public imagination and in political discourse. Looking at the ideological tensions between Britons’ sense of themselves as free people and their willingness to enslave Africans abroad, Richardson shows that from the 1770s those simmering tensions became politicized even as British slaving activities reached unprecedented levels, mobilizing public opinion to coerce Parliament to confront and begin to resolve the issue between 1788 and 1807.
In this broad-ranging book, the preeminent authority on the history of slavery meditates on the orgins, experience, and legacy of this "peculiar institution." David Brion Davis begins with a substantial and highly personal introduction in which he discusses some of the major ideas and individuals that have shaped his approach to history. He then presents a series of interlocking essays that cover topics including slave resistance, the historical construction of race, and the connections between the abolitionist movement and the struggle for women's rights. The book also includes essays on such major figures as Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as appreciations of two of the finest historians of the twentieth century: C. Vann Woodward and Eugene D. Genovese. Gathered together for the first time, these essays present the major intellectual, historical, and moral issues essential to the study of New World slavery and its devastating legacy. Book jacket.
First published in 1979, this volume offers students and teachers a unique view of American history prior to the Civil War. Distinguished historian David Brion Davis has chosen a diverse array of primary sources that show the actual concerns, hopes, fears, and understandings of ordinary antebellum Americans. He places these sources within a clear interpretive narrative that brings the documents to life and highlights themes that social and cultural historians have brought to our attention in recent years. Beginning with the family and the issue of socialization and influence, the units move on to struggles over access to wealth and power; the plight of &"outsiders&" in an &"open&" society; and ideals of progress, perfection, and mission. The reader of this volume hears a great diversity of voices but also grasps the unities that survived even the Civil War.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award 2014 With this volume, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history. Bringing to a close his staggeringly ambitious, prizewinning trilogy on slavery in Western culture Davis offers original and penetrating insights into what slavery and emancipation meant to Americans. He explores how the Haitian Revolution respectively terrified and inspired white and black Americans, hovering over the antislavery debates like a bloodstained ghost. He offers a surprising analysis of the complex and misunderstood significance the project to move freed slaves back to Africa. He vividly portrays the dehumanizing impact of slavery, as well as the generally unrecognized importance of freed slaves to abolition. Most of all, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.
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