David Brion Davis (born February 16, 1927) is a principal authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He is the 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 is a foremost intellectual and cultural historian. The author and editor of sixteen books, and frequent contributor to The New York Review of...
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David Brion Davis (born February 16, 1927) is a principal authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He is the 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 is a foremost intellectual and cultural historian. The author and editor of sixteen books, and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Davis has played a principal role in shifting the focus of historical study toward the way historical events are experienced, perceived, structured, and understood. Especially important in his interpretations of history are religion, the way that most individuals have, for millennia, sought to understand their place in the world and the meaning and direction of history, and ideology, which he regards as the link between material conditions, political interests, and the individual. Ideology, in his view, is not a deliberate distortion...
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