David Brion Davis

David Brion Davis (born February 16, 1927 in Denver , Colorado , † April 14, 2019 in Guilford , Connecticut ) was an American historian at Yale University . He was known for his studies in slavery and abolitionism .

Life

David Brion Davis was the son of the journalist and writer Clyde Brion Davis and the writer Martha Wirt Davis. In June 1945 he was drafted into the United States Army and - since he had learned German - assigned to the Zone Constabulary , which performed police tasks in the American zone of occupation and was referred to as the "Security Police". In Mannheim he experienced the brutality with which white military police treated their black “comrades”. These experiences contributed to Davis's engagement in the civil rights movement and to his turning to the history of racial relations in the United States as a historian.

Davis studied history and received his PhD from Harvard University . He taught at Cornell University for 14 years before moving to Yale in 1970. He was director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, which he directed from 1998 to 2004. He was president of the Organization of American Historians (1988–1989).

“Like no other, Davis has traced the arguments for and against slavery since ancient times in his books with enormous detailed knowledge. He referred to the ambivalences and contradictions that were characteristic of the religious and philosophical debates in the 'western world'. [...] In contrast to the majority of his colleagues, who approach the phenomenon of slavery and slave trade with quantitative, economic-historical questions, Davis sees himself as an 'intellectual historian'. In his recent studies, he is concerned with the 'big lines' and the 'big picture'. [...] Davis' books are characterized by the fact that they offer new perspectives for specialists and at the same time appeal to a broad audience. In addition, he tirelessly opened the eyes of American history teachers for many years in summer courses to the complexity of the phenomenon of slavery. "

He completed his trilogy on the role of the institution of slavery in 2014 with the volume The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation . With the standard works that he wrote over the last 48 years, he traced slavery from the philosophical justifications in antiquity, through the relationship of Christianity to slavery, through the height of the slave economy and increasing criticism, to the debates about the abolition in Great Britain and the colonies, in the United States States and finally with the Lei Áurea in Brazil. Davis' approach was shaped by the consideration of slavery as a problem and a contradiction in philosophy and ethics, the inner contradiction of man as a thing. A key question was how it could happen that the abolitionist movement was successful within a comparatively short time. In his work he worked out that political philosophy has influence and can assert itself against power and economic interests: The abolition of slavery took place after thousands of years in the 19th century, when its economic function was unbroken.

Davis died in April 2019 at the age of 92 after a long illness.

Honors

1967: Pulitzer Prize in the "General Non-Fiction" category
1976: National Book Award in the "Nonfiction" category (non-fiction)
1976: Bancroft Prize
1976: Admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1983: Admission to the American Philosophical Society
1992: Admission to the British Academy
2007: Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize for Inhuman Bondage, the Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
2014: National Humanities Medal
2014: National Book Critics Circle Award for The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
2015: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement

Fonts (selection)

As an 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. A study in social values , 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. Knopf 2014, ISBN 978-0307269096 .

As editor

with 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

literature

Andreas Eckert : Against slavery. Historians of the free world: David Brion Davis turns eighty , FAZ February 16, 2007, p. 35.

Individual evidence

↑ David Brion Davis, Prizewinning Historian of Slavery, Dies at 92 , nytimes.com, published and accessed April 15, 2019
^ Obituary yale.edu, accessed April 15, 2019
↑ David Brion Davis: The Americanized Mannheim of 1945-46 . In: William Leuchtenburg (ed.): American Places. Encounters With History. A Celebration of Sheldon Meyer . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000, ISBN 0-19-513026-X , pp. 79-91, here p. 82.
↑ Maria Höhn, Martin Klimke: A touch of freedom? African American soldiers, the US civil rights movement, and Germany . transcript, Bielefeld 2016, ISBN 978-3-8376-3492-1 , p. 20.
↑ David Brion Davis: The Americanized Mannheim of 1945-46 . In: William Leuchtenburg (ed.): American Places. Encounters With History . Oxford 2000, p. 89.
↑ David Brion Davis: The Americanized Mannheim of 1945-46 . In: William Leuchtenburg (ed.): American Places. Encounters With History . Oxford 2000, p. 91.
↑ From the tribute to the Phi Beta Kappa Society for the award of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize.
^ Drew Gilpin Faust : The Scholar Who Shaped History . In: New York Review of Books , March 20, 2014.
↑ Patrick Bahners : The Problem of Slavery. On the ninetieth of the historian David Brion Davis . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of February 16, 2017, p. 11.

personal data
SURNAME	Davis, David Brion
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American historian
DATE OF BIRTH	February 16, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH	Denver , Colorado
DATE OF DEATH	April 14, 2019
Place of death	Guilford , Connecticut

[1] David Brion Davis, Prizewinning Historian of Slavery, Dies at 92 , nytimes.com, published and accessed April 15, 2019

[2] Obituary yale.edu, accessed April 15, 2019

[3] David Brion Davis: The Americanized Mannheim of 1945-46 . In: William Leuchtenburg (ed.): American Places. Encounters With History. A Celebration of Sheldon Meyer . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000, ISBN 0-19-513026-X , pp. 79-91, here p. 82.

[4] Maria Höhn, Martin Klimke: A touch of freedom? African American soldiers, the US civil rights movement, and Germany . transcript, Bielefeld 2016, ISBN 978-3-8376-3492-1 , p. 20.

[5] David Brion Davis: The Americanized Mannheim of 1945-46 . In: William Leuchtenburg (ed.): American Places. Encounters With History . Oxford 2000, p. 89.

[6] David Brion Davis: The Americanized Mannheim of 1945-46 . In: William Leuchtenburg (ed.): American Places. Encounters With History . Oxford 2000, p. 91.

[7] From the tribute to the Phi Beta Kappa Society for the award of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize.

[8] Drew Gilpin Faust : The Scholar Who Shaped History . In: New York Review of Books , March 20, 2014.

[9] Patrick Bahners : The Problem of Slavery. On the ninetieth of the historian David Brion Davis . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of February 16, 2017, p. 11.