Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures) - Tapa dura

Few scholars equal Davis's breadth and depth of knowledge mastered during his long career. Indeed, few would fault Davis if he merely took the opportunity to retrace old ground in his lectures, but it is a hallmark of this distinguished historian that he continues to recast his material, engage new sources, and think out loud in productive fashion about the meaning of slavery in the western world...By marking his retelling of the abolition of slavery with new signposts, by casting new actors in leading roles, and by proposing the existence of a much more elaborate historical context, Davis once again prompts his readers to think anew about not only the history of slavery but also the history of the United States.--Michael J. Guasco"Journal of Southern History" (05/01/2005)

Here, David Brion Davis offers a 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 labour 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 the 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 work puts slavery in a new light and underscores anew the desperate human tragedy lying at the very heart of the American story.