From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture - Softcover

Davis, David Brion

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195054180 ISBN 13: 9780195054187

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1988

Synopsis

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-subversion, 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.

About this title

About the Author:

David Brion Davis is at Yale University.

Review:

"The outstanding historian of the dark underside of Western culture....Few historians have used such a breadth of sources or achieved such international vision....Even if his work were not of such substantive importance, this volume would deserve wide reading as a model of how history can and ought to be done."--The Historian

"Anything Mr. Davis has to say on this subject is worth reading."--The New York Times Book Review

"One of the leading historians of our time....[The book] provides an impressive reminder that...Davis has produced a body of work that is remarkable for its range and its interdisciplinary concerns as well as for its depth and its sophistication."--Journal of American History

"Illustrates the extraordinary range of Davis's interests and his astonishing versatility as a scholar....[A] splendid volume of provocative essays."--Church History

"Having in a single volume Davis's work of more than thirty years...enables one easily to grasp Davis's range and his gifts as a historian, which are truly remarkable....These articles chart Davis's own intellectual journey from a consideration of violence in our national experience into the arena of conflicting loyalties through the space of the American West on to the position of slavery in the western world....This collection makes quite clear why David Brion Davis ranks as one of our most respected historians."--Georgia Historical Review

"Students of slavery and abolition will find much new material and many fresh insights....Davis has once again produced a valuable guide to a large subject and a large literature."--Slavery and Abolition

"[These essays] are rich in ideas, lean of prose, and the products of a first-rate mind."--Library Journal

"David Brion Davis...ranks among the most successful practitioners of sophisticated popular history. From Homicide to Slavery is a worthy testament to more than 20 years' study of America's cultural past....An eloquent union of social and scholarly commitments."--The Philadelphia Inquirer

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0195054180
• ISBN 13: 9780195054187
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320