Table of Contents

Maps
A Selective Calendar of Events
Prologue
1: The Amistad Test of Law and Justice
2: The Ancient Foundations of Modern Slavery
3: The Origins of Anti-Black Racism in the New World
4: How Africans Became Integral to New World History
5: The Atlantic Slave System: Brazil and the Caribbean
6: Slavery in Colonial North America
7: The Problem of Slavery in the American Revolution
8: The Impact of the French and Haitian Revolutions
9: Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century South, I: From Contradiction to Defense
10: Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century South, II: From Slaveholder Treatment and the Nature of Labor to Slave Culture, Sex and Religion, and Free Blacks
11: Some Nineteenth-Century Slave Conspiracies and Revolts
12: Explanations of British Abolitionism
13: Abolitionism in America
14: The Politics of Slavery in the United States
15: The Civil War and Slave Emancipation
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

About the Author

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.

Reviews

A tour de force...Could not be more welcome...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 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

A tour de force...Could not be more welcome...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 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