David Brion Davis

David Brion Davis ( born February 16, 1927) is a retired American professor of history at Yale University. He is known for his studies on slavery and abolitionism.

Life

He received his doctorate at Harvard University. He taught 14 years at Cornell University before moving to Yale in 1970. He is Director Emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, which he directed in 1998 and ran until 2004. He was president of the Organization of American Historians ( 1988-89 ) and was awarded the 1967 Pulitzer Prize (General Non-Fiction ), as well as the National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize. In 2007, he was honored for Inhuman Bondage, the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World with the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize - the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

" Like no other Davis has the arguments for and against slavery traced in his books with enormous detail knowledge since ancient times. Doing so, he referred to the ambivalences and contradictions that were responsible for the religious and philosophical debates in the ' western world ' characteristic. [. ..] Unlike the majority of his colleagues that the phenomena are approaching slavery and the slave trade in quantitative economic history questions, Davis sees as ' intellectual historian. ' his concern, especially in its more recent studies about the ' great lines ' and the ' overall picture '. [ ... ] the books of Davis are characterized in that they offer new perspectives for specialists and at the same time appeal to a wide audience. tirelessly he has also for many years the eyes to the complexity of the phenomenon open slavery in summer school American history teachers. "

His trilogy on the role of the institution of slavery, he completed in 2014 with the band, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. With the standard works, resulting in 48 years he pursued the slavery of the philosophical justifications in antiquity about the relationship of Christianity to slavery on the economic peak and the increasing criticism up to the debates on the abolition in Great Britain and the colonies in the United States and as a final moment in Brazil. Davis access is influenced by the consideration of slavery as a problem and contradiction in philosophy and ethics, the inner contradiction of man as a thing. In his work, he works out that political philosophy has influence and can prevail against the power and economic interests: the abolition of slavery took place after thousands of years held in the 19th century, when their economic function was unbroken.

Works

As author

  • Freedom, equality, liberation. The United States and the idea of ​​revolution, Wagenbach, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-8031-5139-2.
  • Homicide in American Fiction 1798-1860, Cornell University Press, 1957
  • The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Cornell University Press, 1966
  • The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823, Cornell University Press, 1975, ISBN 0-8014-0888-1
  • In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values ​​, and Our Heritage of Slavery, Yale University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-300-08814-0
  • Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery, Harvard University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-674-01985-7
  • Inhuman Bondage, the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-19-514073-7
  • The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. Button 2014, ISBN 978-0307269096

As editor

  • Steven Mintz, The Boisterous Sea of ​​Liberty: A Documentary History of America from Discovery through the Civil War, Oxford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-19-511669-0
Ralph Waldo Emerson Award Classical antiquity Drew Gilpin Faust
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