The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation - Paperback

by David Brion Davis (Author)

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award 2014

With 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.

Author Biography

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, and founder and Director Emeritus of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He has written and edited sixteen books, the most recent of which was Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His books have won the Pulitzer Prize, The Bancroft Prize, and the National Book Awards. In 2014 President Obama awarded Davis with the 2013 National Humanities Medal "for reshaping our understanding of history." He lives outside New Haven, Connecticut.