DAVIS, DAVID BRION

DAVIS, DAVID BRION (1927– ), U.S. historian. The son of writer Claude Brion Davis and Martha Wirt Davis, David Davis was educated at Dartmouth College, Oxford University, and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1956. He acquired a wide range of cultural and intellectual experiences before his first appointment at Cornell University, where he taught until 1978. Well into his academic career, and after years of serious thought, Davis chose to convert to Judaism.   Davis is a pioneer in the effort to understand slavery and abolition. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1967) reflects his effort to probe slavery as a "problem" in enlightened cultures rather than simply as an evil and aberrant institution. His earliest monograph was Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860 (1957). At his retirement from Yale in 2001, he was founding director of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute for the Study of Slavery and Sterling Professor of American History. Davis has served as visiting professor at numerous universities, and has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize. In 1987–88 he served as president of the Organization of American Historians. Known as a superb lecturer and teacher, Davis supervised 60 dissertations while on the Yale faculty, and fostered the careers of dozens of leading American scholars whose work extends far beyond studies of slavery, to include almost every phase of American history. His professional and personal confession is contained in his book of essays In the Image of God (2001), where he builds his case as an intellectual historian and an explorer of the human spirit, identifying the seminal experiences in his life that shaped his character. The essay at the beginning of the collection conveys his sense of where his conversion to Judaism meets his passion for understanding slavery in the broad spiritual sense. The essay also tracks his seminal experience with racism during his service in Europe during World War II. While never an apologist for the role some Jews may have played in the industry of slavery, Davis has argued against any notion of collective Jewish guilt, or any attempts to see Jewish participation in the slave trade as disproportionate to the population as a whole. In fact, Davis used this myth to highlight the significant contributions of Jews to American business, letters, entertainment, and science (New York Review of Books, Dec. 1994, and New Republic, Apr. 12, 1993). Other books by Davis include Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975); Slavery and Human Progress (1984); From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (1986); and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2005) (William Cutter (2nd ed.)