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by David Brion Davis
From the revered historian, the long-awaited conclusion of the magisterial history of slavery and emancipation in Western culture that has been nearly fifty years in the making.
David Brion Davis is one of the foremost historians of the twentieth century, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and nearly every award given by the historical profession. Now, with The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, Davis brings his staggeringly ambitious, prizewinning trilogy on slavery in Western culture to a close. Once again, 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, and he offers a surprising analysis of the complex and misunderstood significance of colonization - the project to move freed slaves back to Africa - to members of both races and all political persuasions. 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 is a monumental and harrowing undertaking following the century of struggle, rebellion, and warfare that led to the eradication of slavery in the new world. An in-depth investigation, a rigorous colloquy of ideas, ranging from Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama, from British industrial "wage slavery" to the Chicago World's Fair, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation is a brilliant conclusion to one of the great works of American history. Above all, Davis captures how America wrestled with demons of its own making, and moved forward.
National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2014
"Starred Review. In stately prose and with unparalleled command of his subject, [Davis] offers a profound historical examination of the termination of servitude in the West ... While requiring much of readers, this is a book of surpassing importance." -Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Deeply researched, ingeniously argued." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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. He lives outside New Haven, Connecticut.
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