In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery

by David Brion Davis

In this broad-ranging book, the pre-eminent authority on the history of slavery meditates on the origins, experience, and legacy of this “peculiar institution.” David Brion Davis begins with a substantial and highly personal introduction in which he discusses some of the major ideas and individuals that have shaped his approach to history. He then presents a series of interlocking essays that cover topics including slave resistance, the historical construction of race, and the connections between the abolitionist movement and the struggle for women’s rights. The book also includes essays on such major figures as Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as appreciations of two of the finest historians of the twentieth C. Vann Woodward and Eugene D. Genovese.

Gathered together for the first time, these essays present the major intellectual, historical, and moral issues essential to the study of New World slavery and its devastating legacy.

Genres: History

368 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2001

About the author

David Brion Davis was an American historian and authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was the 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. He was a foremost intellectual and cultural historian. The author and editor of 17 books, and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Davis played a principal role in explaining the latest historiography to a broad audience. His books emphasized religious and ideological links among material conditions, political interests, and new political values.