David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale
University and Director Emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center for
the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, also at Yale. Best
known for his highly acclaimed books The Problem of Slavery in
Western Culture, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution,
1770-1823, Slavery and Human Progress, and most recently,
Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery, Davis
has won a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award for History and
Biography, the Bancroft Prize, the Albert J. Beveridge Award, and
the Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement, among other
honors.
"Davis is always judicious and thought-provoking while providing a
well-written summation of 20th century scholarship for general
readers. Essential."--R.T. Brown, CHOICE
"Inhuman Bondage is, in essence, a retrospective: a brilliant and
nuanced summing up of nearly fifty years' scholarship on slavery
and abolition, much of it pioneered by Davis himself....It is a
masterful study: broad in conception, bang up to date, consistently
challenging, accessible and beautifully written."--John Oldfield,
Patterns of Prejudice
"Inhuman Bondage lives up to what readers expect from Davis: it is
engagingly written and impressively broad in its scope and
analysis."--Laurent Dubois, American Historical Reivew
"A tour de force....Could not be more welcome....Davis follows the
large story of slavery into all corners of the Atlantic world,
demonstrating that hardly anyone or anything was untouched by it.
He is particularly interested in the way ideas shaped slavery's
development. But 'Inhuman Bondage' is not a history without people.
Princes, merchants and reformers of all sorts play their role,
though Davis gives pride of place to the men and women who
suffered
bondage. Drawing on some of the best recent studies, he not only
adjudicates between the arguments, but also provides dozens of new
insights, large and small, into events as familiar as the revolt
on
Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and the American Civil War....An
invaluable guide to explaining what has made slavery's consequences
so much a part of contemporary American culture and politics."--Ira
Berlin, The New York Times Book Review
"Davis masterfully navigates the long history of slavery from
ancient times to its abolition in the 19th century....Succeeds
heroically in wrestling a vast amount of material from diverse
cultures. The result is a sinewy book that combines erudition and
everyday detail into a gripping, often surprising,
narrative."--Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street Journal
"David Brion Davis has been the preeminent historian of ideas about
slavery in the Western world since the early modern
period....Davis, a leading practitioner of intellectual and
cultural history, has now gone far beyond the history of ideas and
attempted to study New World slavery in all its ramifications,
social, economic, and political, as well as intellectual and
cultural....He convincingly demonstrates that slavery was central
to the history of the New
World."--George M. Fredrickson, The New York Review of Books
"David Brion Davis, our greatest historian of slavery and
abolition, weaves together here one of the central stories of
modern world history--and does so with a power, authority, and
grace that is his alone."--Edward L. Ayers, author of In the
Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America,
1859-1863
"Ranging from ancient Babylonia to the modern Western Hemisphere,
David Brion Davis offers a concise history of slavery and its
abolition that once again reminds us why he is the foremost scholar
of international slavery. There is no more up-to-date account of
this pivotal aspect of the world's history."--Eric Foner, author of
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
"Impressive and sprawling....Davis's account is rich in detail, and
his voice is clear enough to coax even casual readers through this
dense history."--Publishers Weekly
"In this gracefully fashioned masterpiece, David Brion Davis draws
on a lifetime of scrupulous scholarship in order to trace the
sources and highlight the distinctiveness of America's central
paradox by situating it in both its New World and Western contexts.
His powerful narrative is enhanced and deepened by persuasively
rendered details. For students of slavery, and of American history
more generally, it is simply indispensable. With all the makings of
a
classic, Inhuman Bondage is the glorious culmination of the
definitive series of studies on slavery by one of America's
greatest living historians."--Orlando Patterson, author of Rituals
of Blood:
Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries
"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."--Ira
Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of
Slavery in North America
"Inhuman Bondage is a magisterial achievement, a model of
comparative and interdisciplinary scholarship, and the best study
we have of American slavery within the broader context of the New
World. It is also a powerful and moving story, told by one of
America's greatest historians."--John Stauffer, author of The Black
Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of
Race
"This brilliant and gripping history of slavery in the New World
summarizes and integrates the scholarship of the past half-century.
It sparkles with insights that only an innovator of David Brion
Davis's caliber could command."--Robert William Fogel, author of
The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: A Retrospective
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
