David Brion Davis

David Brion Davis
Born (1927-02-16) February 16, 1927
Denver, Colorado
Nationality American
Fields History
Institutions Yale University
Alma mater Dartmouth College
Harvard University
Spouse Toni Hahn Davis

David Brion Davis (born February 16, 1927 in Denver, Colorado) is an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He is a 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. The author and editor of 17 books, he received the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama in 2014 for "reshaping our understanding of history." He also received the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement in contributions to public understanding of racism and appreciation of cultural diversity, and the 2015 Biennial Coif Book Award, a top honor from the Association of American Law Schools for the leading law-related book published in 2013 and 2014.

In the White House ceremony in which he conferred the National Humanities Medal, President Obama praised Professor Davis for shedding "light on the contradiction of a Union founded on liberty, yet existing half-slave and half-free." He also declared that Professor Davis's "examinations of slavery and abolitionism drive us to keep making moral progress in our time."

At age 89, Davis sat with eight other honorands, including Steven Spielberg, before an audience of 35,000 at the Harvard Commencement on May 26, 2016 where he received an honorary doctorate degree.

A frequent contributor to The New York Review of 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.[1]

After serving on the Cornell University faculty for 14 years, Davis taught at Yale from 1970 to 2001. He has held one-year appointments as the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford University (1969-1970), at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and as the first French-American Foundation Chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Biography

Early life

Born in Denver in 1927, the son of the journalist, novelist, and screenwriter Clyde Brion Davis, and the artist and writer Martha Wirt Davis, 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.[2]

Davis was drafted in the U.S. Army in June 1945, and was assigned to the occupation of Germany in 1945-46. Since he knew some German he was assigned to police civilians.[3] On the troop ship to France in fall 1945 he personally witnessed segregation and mistreatment of black soldiers,[4] and in Germany he encountered many of the issues involving moral evil and racism that would dominate his later scholarship.

Academic career

Davis attended Dartmouth College, majoring in philosophy. He attended Harvard for three years, 1951–53 and 1954–55, where he completed his dissertation under Howard Mumford Jones. After a year teaching at Dartmouth he joined Cornell University's history faculty. In the 1960s he published several works on slavery and its place in Western culture, as well as aspects of its history and reform movements in the United States. He was on the Cornell faculty for 14 years.

In 1970 Davis moved to Yale, where he taught until 2001.

In 1998 Davis founded Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and directed it until 2004.

Work

Cultural history

In a seminal 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.[5]

His revised dissertation, Homicide in American Fiction (1957), which located literary treatments of murder against shifting legal, psychological, and religious notions of personal responsibility, the nature and origins of evil, and mental and emotional abnormality, anticipated later works in the new cultural history and the new historicism. By situating popular and canonical literature against a backdrop of developments in early psychiatry, jurisprudence, moral philosophy, and theology, Davis explored the intricate connections between intellectual developments—such as evolving conceptions of the unconscious; social phenomena—such as the shifting roles and status of women; and the “free floating” fantasies of literature, where authors worked out, on an imaginative level, the implications of such social and intellectual transformations.

In succeeding works of American cultural history, including The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (1970), The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (1971), Antebellum American Culture (1979), Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations (1990), and The Boisterous Sea of Liberty (1999), Davis underscored the significance of the cultural dimension in understanding United States politics and society.

In The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (1969) and The Fear of Conspiracy (1971), Davis explores the role played in American history by fears of conspiracy and subversion. He highlights the American tendency to search for subversive enemies and to construct terrifying dangers from fragmentary and highly circumstantial evidence. In Revolutions, he analyzes Americans’ highly ambivalent responses to foreign revolutions—-from ecstatic celebrations of foreign peoples’ embrace of American ideals of democratic self-government to apocalyptic fears of foreign subversion. In addition to asking how a nation forged in revolution became, in the twentieth century, “the world’s leading adversary of popular revolutions,” he looks at how foreign revolutions at times expanded and sometimes constricted conceptions about the possibilities for reform at home.

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.[6]

Study of slavery

University of Maryland historian Ira Berlin write 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.”[7] 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.[8] He demonstrates slavery's centrality to the making of the modern world, the construction of modern conceptions of race, and the creation of dynamic New World economies. He saw it as part of the rise of the world's first system of multinational production for what emerged as a mass market—a market for sugar, tobacco, coffee, dye-stuffs, rice, hemp, and cotton, all of which were produced by slave labor. In addition, he depicts slavery as a central theme in American history, shaping the meaning and outcome of the American Revolution, the creation of the U.S. Constitution, the growth of competing political parties, and the escalating sectional conflicts that resulted in civil war.

Anti-slavery

In his scholarship, Davis has addressed the central question of why the first collective protests emerged against slavery only in the mid- and late-eighteenth century, as the institution had dated to prehistoric times. Central to his interpretation was a shifting cultural understanding of sin. Long regarded as a part of the natural order ordained by God and as a penalty for sin, slavery came to be seen as an outrage to human benevolence, a deterrent to economic growth, and as the very embodiment of sin. A convergence of forces, including a crisis within the Society of Friends precipitated by the Seven Years' War and the growth of Evangelical and Enlightenment thought, contributed to the sudden growth in antislavery sentiment.

Davis has also asked why antislavery became a mass movement in Great Britain at a time of political reaction in society. His answer focuses on the ways that antislavery helped to legitimate an emerging free labor ideology.

Moral thinker

In his scholarship, Davis has been preoccupied with questions of evil, from homicide to slavery and racism. He has analyzed the historical circumstances and ideologies that gave rise to history's greatest horrors. He has sought to understand the ways cultures have "demonized" the Other; the bureaucratization of enslavement; and the relationship between collective violence and utopian and messianic ideals.

As a scholar and teacher, he has championed a conception of history built around five basic commitments. The first is to history with a moral dimension. He regards history as a moral enterprise, which seeks to understand the circumstances that allow evil to happen, how people as moral and intelligent as we could participate in the most horrendous moral evils, and how at certain historical moments, individuals were able to rise above their circumstances, address evil in fundamental ways, and expand moral consciousness. In his teaching as well as his scholarship, he has focused on various forms of oppressions, subtle as well as glaring, and the way that these have been rationalized and masked.

A second commitment is 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.[9] This perspective has led many of his students to focus not on elites or intellectuals but on the values of slaves, artisans, and working-class women, for example, and the way they resisted economic and cultural oppression.

A third commitment is to the centrality of ideas. His is a history that emphasizes perception and meaning, both the meanings that people assigned at the time, and the meanings ascribed in retrospect. He pays especially close attention to religious ideas as the way most people throughout history have made sense of the world and their place in it.

At a time when the hegemony of social history was nearly complete, he continued to defend the importance of intellectual history. He rejected the idea that ideas should be treated as free floating entities that can be studied without reference to their social, economic, and political setting. But he insisted that ideas are indispensable to studying the past, because human beings have minds.

His fourth commitment is toward overcoming the parochialism of national histories. Only by bridging the boundaries of continents, nations, and time can people understand how the history of the United States fits into the large process of modernization. Only by situating United States history in a broader multinational frame and seeing the “big picture” can people understand broader issues of power and exploitation, the construction of race, and the nature and limits of social reform.

Fifth and finally, Davis sees the problem of slavery as central to any thorough understanding of the process of modernity. Slavery was not only indispensable to the emergence of modern consumer societies and the settlement and development of the New World, it was also connected to the rise of new notions of liberty and equality. He demonstrates that the struggle against slavery was part of a much broader revolution in intellectual and moral life, giving rise to new conceptions of autonomy and exploitation. In condemning slavery, abolitionists developed new notions of contract that radically reshaped attitudes toward poverty, labor relations, the Bible, and marriage.

Students

Davis taught more than a generation of students, and advised many doctoral students, including such prize-winning historians as Edward Ayers, Karen Halttunen, T. J. Jackson Lears, Steven Mintz, Lewis Perry, Joan Shelley Rubin, Jonathan Sarna, Barbara Savage, Amy Dru Stanley, Christine Stansell, John Stauffer, and Sean Wilentz. Davis’s students have honored him with two festschrifts, Moral Problems in American Life (1998), edited by Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry, and The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of Reform (2007), edited by Steven Mintz and John Stauffer.

Personal life

Davis has three children by his first marriage: Jeremiah Jonathan Davis, Martha Davis Beck, and Sarah Brion Davis, as well as three grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Davis married Toni Hahn Davis on Sept. 9, 1971; she currently serves as Associate Dean for Alumni and Public Affairs at Yale Law School. They have two children, Adam Jeffrey and Noah Benjamin, and four grandchildren.

Career summary

Appointments

Awards

Fellowships

Honors

Publications

References

  1. ↑ George M. Fredrickson, "The Uses of Antislavery", New York Review of Books, 16 October 1975
  2. ↑ 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)
  3. ↑ 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.
  4. ↑ americanantiquarian.org
  5. ↑ “Some Recent Directions in American Cultural History,” American Historical Review, Feb. 1968, 696-707.
  6. ↑ David Brion Davis, Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press), xxii
  7. ↑ Quoted in Goodman (2006)
  8. ↑ Davis, David Brion. "The Central Fact of American History,"American Heritage, Feb/March 2005.
  9. ↑ Davis, Antebellum American Culture, xxii-xxiii.
  10. ↑ "General Nonfiction". Past winners and finalists by category. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved 2012-03-17.
  11. ↑ "National Book Awards – 1976". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-17.
  12. ↑ Harvard University Gazette, June 4, 2009.
  13. ↑ Alexandra Alter (March 12, 2015). "'Lila' Honored as Top Fiction by National Book Critics Circle". New York Times. Retrieved March 12, 2015.

Further reading

External links

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