From Homicide to Slavery Studies in American Culture

by Davis, David Brion

• ISBN13: 9780195040890
• ISBN10: 0195040899
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1986-11-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

For more than twenty years David Brion Davis has been recognized as a leading authority on the moral and ideological responses to slavery in the Western world. From Homicide to Slavery , Davis's first book of collected essays, brings together selections reflecting his wide-ranging interests in colonial history, Afro-American history, the social sciences, and American literature. The essays are interconnected by Davis's central concern with violence, irrationality, and the definition of moral limits during a period when Americans believed they were breaking free from historical constraints and acquiring new powers of self-perfection. Topics range from a socially revealing murder trial in 1843 to debates over capital punishment, movements of counter-subverison, the iconography of race, the cowboy as an American hero, the portrayal of violence in American literature, the historiography of slavery, and the British and American antislavery movements.

Author Biography

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University

Table of Contents

Violence and Virility in American Culture
Murder in New Hampshire	p. 3
The Movement To Abolish Capital Punishment in America, 1787-1861	p. 17
Violence in American Literature	p. 41
Stress-Seeking and the Self-Made Man in American Literature, 1894-1914	p. 52
The Redeeming West
Ten-Gallon Hero	p. 75
The Deerslayer, A Democratic Knight of the Wilderness: Cooper, 1841	p. 90
Marlboro Country	p. 104
Secrets of the Mormons	p. 113
Problems of Loyalty and Identity
Patricide and Regicide	p. 127
Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature	p. 137
Some Ideological Functions of Prejudice in Ante-Bellum America	p. 155
The American Family and Boundaries in Historical Perspective	p. 166
Studies in Slavery and Antislavery
Slavery, and the Post-World War II Historians	p. 187
Of Human Bondage	p. 207
Out of the Shadows	p. 218
New Sidelights on Early Antislavery Radicalism	p. 228
The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought	p. 238
James Cropper and the British Anti-Slavery Movement
1821-23	p. 258
1823-33	p. 273
American Slavery and the American Revolution	p. 290
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