The problem of slavery in the age of emancipation
By: David Brion Davis
Edition: First Vintage Books edition.
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 422
ISBN-13: 9780307389695
Subjects: American Colonization Society; Slavery; Colonization; Slaves; Emancipation; Free African Americans; African Americans; Antislavery movements; History
Description: David Brion Davis is one of the foremost historians of the twentieth century, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bancroft Prize, and nearly every award given by the historical profession. Now, with The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, Davis brings his staggeringly ambitious, prizewinning trilogy on slavery in Western culture to a close. Once again, Davis offers original and penetrating insights into what slavery and emancipation meant to Americans. He explores how the Haitian Revolution respectively terrified and inspired white and black Americans, hovering over the antislavery debates like a bloodstained ghost, and he offers a surprising analysis of the complex and misunderstood significance of colonization - the project to move freed slaves back to Africa - to members of both races and all political persuasions. He vividly portrays the dehumanizing impact of slavery, as well as the generally unrecognized importance of freed slaves to abolition. Most of all, Davis presents the age of emancipation as a model for reform and as probably the greatest landmark of willed moral progress in human history. This is a monumental and harrowing undertaking following the century of struggle, rebellion, and warfare that led to the eradication of slavery in the new world.  An in-depth investigation, a rigorous colloquy of ideas, ranging from Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama, from British industrial "wage slavery" to the Chicago World's Fair, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation is a brilliant conclusion to one of the great works of American history. Above all, Davis captures how America wrestled with demons of its own making, and moved forward.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 345-403) and index.
Table of contents: title: Some meanings of slavery and emancipation : dehumanization, animalization, and free soil; title: The first emancipations : freedom and dishonor; title: Colonizing blacks, part I: Migration and deportation; title: Colonizing blacks, part II: The American Colonization Society and Americo-Liberians; title: Colonizing blacks, part III: From Martin Delany to Henry Highland Garnet and Marcus Garvey; title: Colonizationalist ideology : Leonard Bacon and "irremediable degradation"; title: From opposing colonization to immediate abolition; title: Free blacks as the key to slave emancipation; title: Fugitive slaves, free soil, and the question of violence; title: The Great Experiment : jubilee, responses, and failure; title: The British mystique : black abolitionists in Britain; title: the leader of the Industrial Revolution and center of "wage slavery."