Books by David Brion Davis

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award 2014With 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.

This volume brings together one of the most provocative debates among historians in recent years. The centre of controversy is the emergence of the anti-slavery movement in the United States and Britain and the relation of capitalism to the development.

A meditation on the origins, experience and legacy of the institution of slavery. A series of interlocking essays cover topics such as slave resistance, the historical construction of race, and the connections between the abolitionist movement and the struggle for women's rights.

Challenging the boundaries of slavery ultimately brought on the Civil War and the unexpected, immediate emancipation of slaves long before it could have been achieved in any other way. This imaginative and fascinating book puts slavery into a new light and underscores anew the desperate human tragedy lying at the very heart of the American story.

Inhuman Bondage is the definitive study of slavery for our time, providing a global perspective on the subject with an emphasis on the United States. Davis is one of our preeminent historians and the authority on America's greatest historical problem.