From Homicide to Slavery : Studies in American Culture

Download or read book From Homicide to Slavery : Studies in American Culture written by David Brion Davis Sterling Professor of History Yale University and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1986-11-20 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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-subverison, 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.