American Antiquarian Society
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One of the world's leading scholars of slavery and abolitionism, David Brion Davis reflected upon the influences and impact of his 1966 work The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. This study examined the various ways that different cultures responded to the contradictions of slavery from antiquity to the early 1770s. The book, which won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, inspired new approaches to the historical and sociological research of the subject and greatly expanded our collective understanding of the impact of slavery on the history of the United States, the Americas and the world.
David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University where he taught from 1970-2001. He is also the Director Emeritus of the Glider-Lehrman Center for Slavery, Abolition and Resistance which he founded in 1998 and ran until 2004. Winner of the Bancroft Prize, the National Book Award, and the Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association, Davis is the author of several books, including Slavery and Human Progress and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution.