David Brion Davis
David Brion Davis | |
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Born | |
Died | April 14, 2019 Guilford, Connecticut, U.S. | (aged 92)
Spouse |
Toni Hahn Davis (m. 1971) |
Parents |
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David Brion Davis (February 16, 1927 – April 14, 2019)
Davis authored or edited 17 books. His books emphasize religious and ideological links among material conditions, political interests, and new political values. Ideology, in his view, is not a deliberate distortion of reality or a façade for material interests; rather, it is the conceptual lens through which groups of people perceive the world around them. He was also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.[3]
Davis received the 1967
After serving on the
Early life
Born in Denver in 1927, the son of Clyde Brion Davis, a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter, and Martha Elizabeth (Wirt) Davis, an artist and writer,[4] Davis lived a peripatetic childhood in California, Colorado, New York, Colorado, and Washington State. He attended five high schools in four years but was popular among his peers.[5] In 1950, he earned a B.A. in philosophy from Dartmouth College, then earned his PhD at Harvard University in 1956.[6]
During World War II, Davis was drafted into the
Work
In an essay in the 1968
Antebellum American Culture (1979), his panoramic look at the cultural discourse surrounding ethnicity, gender, family, race, science, and wealth and power in the pre-Civil War United States, advanced the argument that American culture needs to be understood in terms of an ongoing "moral civil war". Diverse groups of Americans debated "what was happening, who was doing what to whom, what to fear and what to fight for." He suggests that a relatively small group of Northeastern writers, preachers, and reformers in the 19th century United States ultimately succeeded in defining a set of middle-class norms regarding education, taste, sex roles, sensibility, and moral respectability.[11]
Study of slavery
Students
Davis taught more than a generation of students, and advised many doctoral students, including such future prize-winning historians as
Career summary
Appointments
- Instructor, Dartmouth College, 1953–1954
- Assistant Professor, Cornell University, 1955–1958
- Associate Professor, Cornell University, 1958–1963
- Ernest I. White Professor of History, Cornell University, 1963–1969
- Farnam Professor of History, Yale University, 1969–1978
- Sterling Professor of History, Yale University, 1978–2001
- Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, 1998–2004
Awards
- Anisfield-Wolf Award, 1967
- Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, 1967 (The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture)[17]
- Mass Media Award, National Conference of Christians and Jews, 1967
- American Historical Association Albert J. Beveridge Award, 1975
- Bancroft Prize, 1976
- National Book Award in History and Biography, 1976 (The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution)[18]
- Presidential Medal, Dartmouth College, 1991
- Society of American Historians Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement, 2004
- Kidger Award for Improving the Teaching of History, 2004
- Association of American Publishers Best Book in History Award 2006
- American Historical Association Scholarly Achievement Award, 2007
- Connecticut Book Award for Nonfiction, 2007
- Phi Beta Kappa Society Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, 2007
- Harvard University Centennial Medal of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2009 [19]
- Association of American Publishers Excellence Award, 2010
- Yale University Phi Beta Kappa DeVane Teaching Award 2011
- National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama at the White House ceremony in 2014
- National Book Critics Circle Award winner for The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, 2015[20]
- Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, 2015
- Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Award for Lifetime Achievement, 2015
- Biennial Coif Book Award, Association of American Law Schools, 2015
- 2016, Honorary Doctorate, Harvard University (awarded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 26, 2016).
Fellowships
- Guggenheim Fellow, 1958–1959
- Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1972–1973
- Fulbright grantee, 1980
- NEH fellow, 1983–1984
- Gilder-Lehrman Inaugural Fellow, 1996–1997
Honors
- Fulbright Senior Lecturer, American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad, India, 1967
- Oxford University, 1969–1970
- French-American Foundation Chair in American Civilization, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1980–1981
- Fulbright Lecturer, University of Guyana and University of the West Indies, 1974
- Honorary Degree, Dartmouth College, 1977
- Honorary Degree, University of New Haven, 1986
- President, Organization of American Historians, 1988–1989
- Presidential Medal for Leadership and Achievement, Dartmouth College, 1991
- Honorary Degree, Columbia University, 1999
- Honorary Degree, Harvard University, 2016
- Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Fellow, American Antiquarian Society
- Fellow, American Philosophical Society
- Fellow (corr.), British Academy
Publications
- Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860: A Study in Social Values, Cornell University Press, 1957; paperback ed., 1968.
- The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Cornell University Press, 1966. 1967 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. History Book Club selection, 1967, paperback ed., 1969; Penguin British ed., 1970; Spanish and Italian translations; Oxford University Press, revised ed., 1988. A new Spanish edition appeared in 1996 and a Brazilian Portuguese edition in 2001. online edition from ACLS E-Books
- Ante-Bellum Reform (editor), Harper and Row, 1967.
- The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style, Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Paperback ed., 1982.
- Was Thomas Jefferson an Authentic Enemy of Slavery? (pamphlet), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1970.
- The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present(editor). Cornell University Press, 1971; paperback ed., 1972.
- The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823, Cornell University Press, 1975; paperback ed., 1976. History Book Club and Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selections. Oxford University Press edition, with a new preface, 1999.
- The Great Republic, "Part III, Expanding the Republic, 1820–1860," a two-volume textbook by Bernard Bailyn and five other historians; D.C. Heath, textbook, 1977. History Book Club selection, 1977. Second ed., wholly revised, 1981. Third ed., wholly revised, 1985. Fourth ed., wholly revised, 1992.
- Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology, Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology, D.C. Heath, 1979; new edition, Pennsylvania State Press, 1997.
- Slavery and the Idea of Progress (address to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and Religion, February 28, 1979) read online
- The Emancipation Moment (pamphlet), Gettysburg College, 1984.
- Slavery and Human Progress, Oxford University Press, 1984. History Book Club alternate selection. Paperback ed., 1986.
- Slavery in the Colonial Chesapeake (pamphlet), Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1986.
- From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture, Oxford University Press, 1986.
- Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations, Harvard University Press, 1990. German translation, 1993.
- Co-author, The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992.
- The Boisterous Sea of Liberty: A Documentary History of America from Discovery Through the Civil War, co-editor Steven Mintz, Oxford University Press, 1998.
- In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery, Yale University Press, 2001.
- Challenging The Boundaries Of Slavery, Harvard University Press, 2003.
- Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, Oxford University Press, 2006
- The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
- "The Problem of Slavery", Introduction to A Historical Guide to World Slavery, ed. Drescher and Engerman, Oxford University Press 1998; read online
References
- ^ "David Brion Davis, Founding Director of the GLC (1927-2019)". The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. 15 April 2019. Retrieved 25 October 2023.
- ^ Smith, Harrison (April 17, 2019). "Historian Reshaped Scholarship of Slavery and Abolition". Washington Post. Retrieved April 18, 2019.
- ^ George M. Fredrickson, "The Uses of Antislavery", The New York Review of Books, 16 October 1975
- ^ "FamilySearch.org". FamilySearch. Retrieved 25 October 2023.
- ^ Richard Wightman Fox, "David Brion Davis: A Biographical Appreciation," Moral Problems in American Life, ed. Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998)
- ^ "David Brion Davis, Pulitzer Prize winner and renowned historian of slavery". YaleNews. 2019-04-15. Retrieved 2023-04-10.
- ^ Proceedings americanantiquarian.org
- ^ David Brion Davis, “World War II and Memory,” Journal of American History, 77, Sept. 1990; Davis, "The Americanized Mannheim," American Places: Encounters with History, ed. William Leuchtenburg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 79–92.
- ^ a b "Harold Brackman's Interview with David Brion Davis". blogs.timesofisrael.com. Retrieved 2020-07-23.
- ^ "Some Recent Directions in American Cultural History", American Historical Review, Feb. 1968, 696–707.
- ^ David Brion Davis, Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press), xxii
- ^ Quoted in Goodman (2006)
- ^ Davis, David Brion. "The Central Fact of American History Archived 2009-10-04 at the Wayback Machine,"American Heritage, Feb/March 2005.
- ^ Dixler, Elsa (April 15, 2019). "David Brion Davis, Prizewinning Historian of Slavery, Dies at 92". The New York Times.
- ^ Davis, Antebellum American Culture, xxii–xxiii.
- JSTOR 27774341.
- ^ "General Nonfiction". Past winners and finalists by category. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2012-03-17.
- ^ "National Book Awards – 1976". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-17.
- ^ Harvard University Gazette [permanent dead link], June 4, 2009.
- ^ Alexandra Alter (March 12, 2015). "'Lila' Honored as Top Fiction by National Book Critics Circle". The New York Times. Retrieved March 12, 2015.
- David Brion Davis, "American and British Slave Trade Abolition in Perspective", Southern Spaces, 4 February 2009.
Further reading
- Fox, Richard Wightman. "David Brion Davis: A Biographical Appreciation," in Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry, eds. Moral Problems in American Life: New Perspectives on Cultural History (Cornell U.P. 1999) pp 331–40
- Goodman, Bonnie K. "History Doyens: David Brion Davis" HistoryMusings" (May 28, 2006)
External links
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- David Brion Davis Papers (MS 1790). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.