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| Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery
ISBN: 9780674030251
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Harvard University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Slavery -- United States -- History; Antislavery movements -- United States -- History;
Davis? brief but insightful analysis of the forces leading to the rise and fall of New World slavery is more than a precis of his past writing on the subject, as the author highlights movements and moments seldom linked to slavery or abolition. However, even an expert historian cannot thoroughly review world slavery in one chapter, and Davis?s 30-page first section ?The Origins and Nature of New World Slavery? contains some glaring omissions. His survey of human bondage features an important discussion of ?white? and Muslim slavery, but Ira Berlin, Ronald Segal and others, including Davis himself, have performed much more thorough dissections of the institution?s complex history. In his second chapter, ?1819: A New Era,? Davis parses two seeds of abolition: Justice Marshall?s decision in McCulloch vs. Maryland, which limited state?s rights, and William Ellery Channing?s ?Baltimore Sermon,? which laid out a reformist, liberal vision of Christianity that encompassed human perfectibility. Finally, Davis traces American abolitionist thought from the American Colonization Society through Garrison to Lincoln, and outlines the fearful southern reaction?which set the stage for the Civil War?in defense of their sacred institution. However, these chapters ignore the contribution of late-18th century Quakerism, which is cited in many other works, including Davis?s own, as the wellspring of American abolitionism. Many readers will also feel he overstates slavery as a casus belli. Still, Davis is an accessible writer who effortlessly blends oft-overlooked demographic trends with oblique micro-histories, and his short book certainly is a useful and enjoyable companion to his other, more comprehensive studies of the ?Great American Problem.? (Nov.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
David Brion Davis was born in Denver, Colorado on February 16, 1927. After Army service in postwar occupied Germany, he received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Dartmouth College in 1950 and a Ph.D. in American history from Harvard University in 1956. He taught at Dartmouth and Cornell University before moving to Yale University in 1970. He was awarded a Sterling professorship in 1978 and was the founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition in 1998. He retired from teaching full time in 2001. He wrote or edited 16 books during his lifetime including Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860: A Study in Social Values; Slavery and Human Progress; In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery; and Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, a National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize in 1976 for The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 for The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. He died on April 14, 2019 at the age of 92. (Bowker Author Biography) |
