From Homicide to Slavery Studies in American Culture [Paperback]

For more than twenty years David Brion Davis has been recognized as a leading authority on the moral and ideological responses to slavery in the Western world.From Homicide to Slavery, Davis's first book of collected essays, brings together selections reflecting his wide-ranging interests in colonial history, Afro-American history, the social sciences, and American literature. The essays are interconnected by Davis's central concern with violence, irrationality, and the definition of moral limits during a period when Americans believed they were breaking free from historical constraints and acquiring new powers of self-perfection. Topics range from a socially revealing murder trial in 1843 to debates over capital punishment, movements of counter-subversion, the iconography of race, the cowboy as an American hero, the portrayal of violence in American literature, the historiography of slavery, and the British and American antislavery movements.

The outstanding historian of the dark underside of Western culture....Few historians have used such a breadth of sources or achieved such international vision....Even if his work were not of such substantive importance, this volume would deserve wide reading as a model of how history can and ought to be done. --The Historian

Anything Mr. Davis has to say on this subject is worth reading. --The New York Times Book Review

One of the leading historians of our time....[The book] provides an impressive reminder that...Davis has produced a body of work that is remarkable for its range and its interdisciplinary concerns as well as for its depth and its sophistication. --Journal of American History

Illustrates the extraordinary range of Davis's interests and his astonishing versatility as a scholar....[A] splendid volume of provocative essays. --Church History

Having in a single volume Davis's work of more than thirty years...enables oneló·