Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery

David Brion Davis was born in Denver, Colorado on February 16, 1927. After Army service in postwar occupied Germany, he received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Dartmouth College in 1950 and a Ph.D. in American history from Harvard University in 1956. He taught at Dartmouth and Cornell University before moving to Yale University in 1970. He was awarded a Sterling professorship in 1978 and was the founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition in 1998. He retired from teaching full time in 2001.

He wrote or edited 16 books during his lifetime including Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860: A Study in Social Values; Slavery and Human Progress; In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery; and Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, a National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize in 1976 for The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 for The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. He died on April 14, 2019 at the age of 92.

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