The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation
  • Published: 15 January 2015
  • ISBN: 9780307389695
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $38.00
Categories:

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

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EBook
4 Feb 2014
Paperback
15 Jan 2015
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From the revered historian--winner of nearly every award given in his field--the long-awaited conclusion of his magisterial three-volume history of slavery in Western culture that has been more than fifty years in the making.

Winner of the  National Book Critics Circle Award 2014

With this volume, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history. Bringing to a close his staggeringly ambitious, prizewinning trilogy on slavery in Western culture Davis offers original and penetrating insights into what slavery and emancipation meant to Americans. He explores how the Haitian Revolution respectively terrified and inspired white and black Americans, hovering over the antislavery debates like a bloodstained ghost. He offers a surprising analysis of the complex and misunderstood significance the project to move freed slaves back to Africa. He vividly portrays the dehumanizing impact of slavery, as well as the generally unrecognized importance of freed slaves to abolition. Most of all, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history.
  • Published: 15 January 2015
  • ISBN: 9780307389695
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $38.00
Categories:

Praise for The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

"Less a political historian than a moral philosopher...his analysis...is subtle, wide-ranging and consistently judicious.... Moral progress may be historical, cultural and institutional, but it isn't inevitable. All the more reason this superb book should be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand our complex and contradictory past."
--Brenda Wineapple, The New York Times Book Review

"Remarkable erudition...continuing engagement with Davis's most important insight--that the emergence of an abolitionist movement in the 18th century amounted to one of the most astonishing moral transformations in human history.... Rather than drift with the scholarly tide, he swam against it.... Unfailingly subtle and insightful.... The shimmering achievement of Davis's great trilogy." --James Oakes, The Washington Post