Person

David Brion Davis

American historian (1927-2019); Sterling Professor of History at Yale; founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Author of the Problem of Slavery trilogy, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966, Pulitzer Prize), The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975, National Book Award and Bancroft Prize), and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014). Generally regarded as the most influential historian of slavery and abolition of the late 20th century.

Major contributions

1. The "problem" frame

Davis reframed the historiography of slavery around an analytical question: how did a practice tolerated for millennia across most human cultures become, within roughly a century (c. 1770-1865), broadly understood as a moral evil requiring abolition? Davis traced this transformation across religious, philosophical, economic, and political registers.

2. Religion and abolition

Davis argued that Christian moral teachings, when read seriously and not selectively, provided indispensable conceptual resources for the abolitionist movement, even though slaveholding societies had to suppress, distort, or selectively edit Christianity to make it compatible with the slave system. His work documents the intellectual labor required to reconcile slaveholding with Christian ethics.

3. Comparative and transatlantic scope

Davis treated slavery as a transatlantic and comparative phenomenon, situating American slavery within its Caribbean, Brazilian, Iberian, and African contexts rather than as an isolated U.S. phenomenon.

Mentions in Christianity in Africa - Roots, Distortions, and Reclamation (ris3n)

Cited (§IV.D) for the argument that "slaveholding societies had to suppress or reinterpret Christian moral teachings because, when taken seriously, they undermined the ethical legitimacy of slavery" (The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 1966).
Adduced as scholarly support for the source's "censorship as evidence" argument, that the production of the Slave Bible is not an embarrassment for Christianity but evidence that Christianity, undistorted, was incompatible with slavery.

Mentions in Defining Chattel Slavery and Biblical Servitude (ris3n)

Cited (§3) alongside Orlando Patterson as a foundational scholar of Atlantic slavery, emphasizing that "modern slavery uniquely reduced human beings to commercial property within a market economy."
Cited (§12) for the broader observation that "slave societies constantly attempted to treat people as property while at the same time recognizing that they were still human beings capable of suffering, resistance, and moral accountability", the foundational tension Davis traces across his Problem of Slavery trilogy.