He was a Yale professor known for his three-volume history of international slavery.
By Harrison Smith Harrison Smith Obituary writer Email Bio Follow April 16 at 5:58 PM David Brion Davis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar whose three-volume chronicle of international slavery demonstrated its centrality to Western history, laying bare its political, economic and cultural impact through prose that was rich in detail and moral power, died April 14. He was 92.
In a phone interview, Eric Foner, a leading historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction, highlighted “the tremendous range and breadth” of Dr. Davis’s research. “He covered centuries — millennia almost — of the history of slavery and anti-slavery thought,” Foner said. “This enabled him to really put slavery at the center of the rise of the West, where previously historians more or less dealt with slavery as a kind of footnote to American or Western history. After Davis, you could not do that.
“When teachers tell their students about the forming of ‘a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,’ ” he wrote in one essay, “how many note that in 1775 the slavery of blacks was legal in all 13 colonies?” “To a really extraordinary extent, David Brion Davis’s students dominate the history profession,” said one former pupil, University of Texas historian Steven Mintz. “David elicited a kind of fondness and affection and loyalty that one rarely sees. He was very humble and very modest and deeply interested in ideas. He had a way of criticizing people’s work that they only viewed as opening up new possibilities.
Dr. Davis studied at Dartmouth College on the G.I. Bill, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1950. He was working toward his PhD at Harvard, nearing completion on a dissertation about homicide in American fiction, when he met Stampp, a visiting professor who was completing his influential book about slavery “The Peculiar Institution.” Dr. Davis resolved “to do for the neglected subject of American antislavery what Stampp had done for slavery.
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