Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Nathan I. Huggins Lectures)

The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures

by David Brion Davis

In this engaging book, David Brion Davis offers an illuminating perspective on American slavery. Starting with a long view across the temporal and spatial boundaries of world slavery, he traces continuities from the ancient world to the era of exploration, with its expanding markets and rise in consumption of such products as sugar, tobacco, spices, and chocolate, to the conditions of the New World settlement that gave rise to a dependence on the forced labor of millions of African slaves. With the American Revolution, slavery crossed another kind of boundary, in a psychological inversion that placed black slaves outside the dream of liberty and equality―and turned them into the Great American Problem.

Davis then delves into a single year, 1819, to explain how an explosive conflict over the expansion and legitimacy of slavery, together with reinterpretations of the Bible and the Constitution, pointed toward revolutionary changes in American culture. Finally, he widens the angle again, in a regional perspective, to discuss the movement to colonize blacks outside the United States, the African-American impact on abolitionism, and the South's response to slave emancipation in the British Caribbean, which led to attempts to morally vindicate slavery and export it into future American states. Challenging the boundaries of slavery ultimately brought on the Civil War and the unexpected, immediate emancipation of slaves long before it could have been achieved in any other way.

This imaginative and fascinating book puts slavery into a brilliant new light and underscores anew the desperate human tragedy lying at the very heart of the American story.

Genres: History

128 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

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.

Reviews

[Graham Butler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick read, good refresher. The thesis that Southern slaveholders created the antislavery movement by overreacting to all antislavery sentiments is funny, but a little too dismissive of black radicals. Makes out the Southern slaveholders as a lot stronger and richer than they were, since he ignores their huge debts financed by Northern banks.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really a collection of three distinct essays by Davis about slavery in America. The first essay is an amazing summary of how slavery came to be the horror that it became in America. In particular, he explains in historical terms how slavery and racism fed each other in a frightening way. It is absolutely brilliant and bursting with new insights that still have my head reeling. The second and third essays cannot help but be a bit of a letdown after that. They are engaging nevertheless. A short but sobering read.

[Miles Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short work covers a lot of ground and offers some great anecdotes. Im not sure it offered any novel insights but it gives an interesting overview.

[Dave Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best short summary of the topic I've read - does a great job of painting the historical arc of slavery and freedom, and situating the American experience within that arc and within its historical context. Highly recommend.

[Chris Jarrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very concise summary and look at various political, economic, and social justice factors that surrounds slavery--with a particular focus on relation to American slavery