David Brion Davis

David Brion Davis is one of the foremost historians of the twentieth century, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and nearly every award given by the historical profession. Now, with The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, Davis brings his staggeringly ambitious, prizewinning trilogy on slavery in Western culture to a close. Once again, 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, and he offers a surprising analysis of the complex and misunderstood significance of colonization - the project to move freed slaves back to Africa - to members of both races and all political persuasions. 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. This is a monumental and harrowing undertaking following the century of struggle, rebellion, and warfare that led to the eradication of slavery in the new world. An in-depth investigation, a rigorous colloquy of ideas, ranging from Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama, from British industrial "wage slavery" to the Chicago World's Fair, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation is a brilliant conclusion to one of the great works of American history. Above all, Davis captures how America wrestled with demons of its own making, and moved forward.

"Davis begins with the dramatic Amistad case, which vividly highlights the international character of the Atlantic slave trade and the roles of the American judiciary, the presidency, the media, and both black and white abolitionists. The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters; the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; the daily life of ordinary slaves; the highly destructive internal, long-distance slave trade; the sexual exploitation of slaves; the emergence of an African-American culture, and much more. But though centered on the United States, the book offers a global perspective spanning four continents. It is the only study of American slavery that reaches back to ancient foundations, discussing the classical and biblical justifications for chattel bondage, and also traces the long evolution of antiblack racism (as in the writings of David Hume and Emmanuel Kant, among many others). Equally important, it combines the subjects of slavery and abolitionism as very few books do, and it illuminates the meaning of nineteenth-century slave conspiracies and revolts, with a detailed comparison of three major revolts in the British Caribbean. It connects the actual life of slaves with the crucial place of slavery in American politics and stresses that slavery was integral to America's success as a nation, not a marginal enterprise."--Dust jacket.

"In this book, David Brion Davis offers a perspective on American slavery. Across temporal and spatial boundaries, he traces slavery from the ancient world to the era of exploration - with its expanding markets in such products as sugar, tobacco, spices, and chocolate - to the conditions of New World settlement that led to dependence on African slave labor. In the American Revolution, the issue of slavery crossed a kind of psychological boundary that placed black slaves outside the dream of liberty and equality and turned them into the Great American Problem." "Davis then delves into a single year, 1819, to explain how an explosive conflict over the expansion and legitimacy of slavery, together with reinterpretations of the Bible and the Constitution, pointed toward revolutionary changes in American culture. Finally, he examines the movement to colonize blacks outside the United States, the African-American impact on abolitionism, and the South's response to slave emancipation in the Caribbean, which led to attempts to morally vindicate slavery and export it into future American states. Challenging these boundaries of slavery ultimately brought on the Civil War, which effected emancipation long before it could have been achieved in any other way." "This book views slavery in a new light and underscores the human tragedy at the heart of the American story."--Jacket.

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 called 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.

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

"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."--Publisher description.

New England reformers, by R. W. Emerson.--The northern attack on slavery, by A. Craven.--The abolitionists and psychology, by M. B. Duberman.--The psychology of commitment: the constructive role of violence and suffering for the individual and for his society, by S. S. Tomkins.--The Anglo-American world of humanitarian endeavor, by F. Thistlethwaite.--Religious benevolence as social control, 1815-1860, by C. S. Griffin.--Charles Grandison Finney, by W. G. McLoughlin.--Religious groups and political parties, by L. Benson.--Temperance, status control, and mobility, 1826-1860, by J. R. Gusfield.--The emergence of immediatism in British and American antislavery thought, by D. B. Davis.--Romantic reform in America, 1815-1865, by J. L. Thomas.--Selective bibliography (p. 177-180).

Drawing on a gold mine of primary documents - including letters, diary entries, personal narratives, political speeches, broadsides, trial transcripts, and contemporary newspaper articles - The Boisterous Sea of Liberty brings the past to life in a way few histories ever do. Here is a panoramic look at American history from the voyages of Columbus through the bloody Civil War, as captured in the words of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe and many other historical figures, both famous and obscure. In these pieces, the living voices of the past speak to us from opposing viewpoints - from the vantage point of loyalists as well as patriots, slaves as well as masters - providing a more sophisticated understanding of the forces that have shaped our society, from the power of public opinion to the nearly absolute power of the slaveholder. The Boisterous Sea of Liberty is a documentary history of America, which uses the first-person testimony to reconstruct the basic forces, events, ideas, and struggles that shaped American society during its formative era. It places the defining documents of American history in their proper context and presents a lively and innovative interpretation of our history from earliest colonization through the Civil War.