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]
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 United States Army in June 1945. On the troop ship to France in fall 1945, he witnessed the segregation and mistreatment of black soldiers.[7] He was assigned to the occupation of Germany in 1945–46. Since he knew some German, Davis was assigned to police civilians.[8] Davis, whose parents "both rebelled against their Christian upbringing", did not identify with any religion until he married Toni Hahn Davis, who is Jewish.[9] In 1987, Davis began his conversion to Judaism and had a Bar Mitzvah in 2008.[9]
Work
In an essay in the 1968 American Historical Review entitled "Some Recent Directions in American Cultural History", Davis urged historians to devote more attention to the cultural dimension to enhance understanding of social controversies, political decision-making, and literary expression. At a time when social history was ascendant, and cultural history was associated with the study of the arts, taste, and popular culture, and intellectual history with the study of abstract ideas largely divorced from specific social contexts, he called for a history that focused on beliefs, values, fears, aspirations, and emotions.[10]
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
University of Maryland historian Ira Berlin wrote that "no scholar has played a larger role in expanding contemporary understanding of how slavery shaped the history of the United States, the Americas, and the world than David Brion Davis."[12] In a series of landmark books, articles, and lectures, Davis moved beyond a view of slavery that focuses on the institution in individual nations to look at the "big picture", the multinational view of the origins, development, and abolition of New World slavery.[13]
The most important of his books is his trilogy on the history of slavery in the Western world, which revealed the centrality of slavery in American and Atlantic history. The trilogy consisted of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975), and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, (2014).[14]
He was committed to a conception of culture as process—a process involving conflict, resistance, invention, accommodation, appropriation, and, above all, power, including the power of ideas. Culture, in his view, involves a cacophony of voices but also social relations that involve hierarchy, exploitation, and resistance.[15]
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.
^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, “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.
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
