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Title: In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery by David Brion Davis ISBN: 0-300-08814-0 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 November, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)
Rating: 3
Summary: 3.3 stars. Book Review Fever!
Comment: David Brion Davis is a leading American historian best known for his superb trilogy on the problem of slavery in western culture. This book promises us a fourth volume on the problem of slavery in the age of emancipation. In the meantime we have a collection of assorted articles published over the past fifteen years or so. Some historians have been able to develop this genre into important works: one thinks of Perry Anderson's "A Zone of Engagement" or Eugene Genovese's "In Red and Black." But such works often say little of originality or importance and often have an artificial unity imposed on them. Such, unfortunately, is the case with this book. This book consists largely of book reviews, most of which come from The New York Review of Books. In it we read reviews of such leading scholars as David Garrow, C. Vann Woodward, Eugene Genovese, Bernard Lewis, David Eltis, Robin Blackburn, Herbert Klein, Jacqueline Jones and Brenda Stevenson. There are also a couple of articles which introduce other, more scholarly articles on the nature of racism. Arguably these are the most important chapters in the book. There is also a useful piece which demonstrates the important if stunningly obvious point that the Jewish role in the Slave Trade was virtually non-existent. (In 1830 less than 0.3% of major American slaveholders were Jewish)
Davis' first essay is on the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and I have to say what one thinks of the book depends on your opinion of that most respected of theologians. If you think Niebuhr was a man of deep realism and profound theology you will appreciate this book. If, however, you think that instead of being "the American Jeremiah" (Davis' phrase) Niebuhr was more the American Tartuffe or the American Vicar of Bray, there will be something off about this collection. I have yet to encounter any liberal or socialist who has vigorously waved the banner of human perfectibility. Such technocratic shortcuts to happiness tend to be associated more with the right such as Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, Edward Teller and Newt Gingrich via Alvin Toffler. Yet Davis (in the age of Clinton no less!) feels it necessary to warn several times against the chimeras of utopianism and perfectability. Although elsewhere Davis writes of the need for government aid to solve poverty, his book is enfeebled by the NYRB fear of appearing too liberal. An article on the relationship between blacks and Jews looks more at the philanthropic activities of Jewish organizations as opposed to the racial views of the Jewish population. At one point Davis, with some pride, points out that a couple of Jews assisted John Brown. Yet at another point, in trying to show that C. Vann Woodward was not a sentimental deracinated liberal, he notes Woodward's distaste for those who engage in "uncritical worship of fanatics like John Brown."
Davis is a bit too indulgent about Genovese's truly awful "The Southern Front," and endorses a misleading point about Southern antebellum tolerance for Jews. (It is true that the first Jewish senator came from Louisiana, but Louisiana is the least Protestant of the Confederate states and no-one has ever argued that New Orleans is a triumph of the quasi-Calvinist Protestant hegemony that Genovese has recently championed.) Discussing the Moynihan Report he wonders how it would possible to support affirmative action and other remedial programs for Africa-Americans without it. But this ignores the manifold problems with the report. By emphasizing the damage slavery had done to the family, Moynihan left the impression that any weaknesses in the African-American family were the result of something that had ended a century and left the idea that the non-Southern majority of the United States was off the hook for anything that had happened since 1865. At the same time there is the perversity, as pointed out by Ruth Feldstein, of how Moynihan, in an age of segregation, disfranchisment and systematic discrimination, singled out the weakest and poorest segment of society, black mothers, and criticized them for, in effect, having too much power and having a bad influence. Similarly, Davis show more "realistic" Niebuhrian concern about the underclass and its mass unemployment and social disorganization than actual knowledge about it.
The reviews themselves are respectful, intelligent and usually thoughtful expressions of Davis' scholarly liberalism. But at the same time they do little to advance Davis' own scholarship. Individually the essays have some value, taken together it is a bit like reading a thirty page historiographical essay extended to 378 pages. Reading this book you will learn more about recent scholarship on the economics of slavery, the nature of abolitionism and the origins of racism. Like the readers of the New York Review of Books you will be updated more than you will be informed. The reviews are only a partial substitute for the monographs themselves.
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Title: Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery : by David Brion Davis ISBN: 0674011821 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: November, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: A Nation under Our Feet : Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration by Steven Hahn ISBN: 0674011694 Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and culture, Williamsburg, Virginia) by Anthony S. Parent ISBN: 0807854867 Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr Pub. Date: September, 2003 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America by Henry Wiencek ISBN: 0374175268 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 15 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: "Negro President" : Jefferson and the Slave Power by Garry Wills ISBN: 0618343989 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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