Berkeleyan

Slavery expert to deliver Jefferson Memorial Lecture

By Barry Bergman, Public Affairs | 27 October 2004

David Brion Davis (Photo courtesy Yale University)

In 1967, David Brion Davis received a Pulitzer Prize for The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, described by The New York Review of Books as an “immensely learned” yet “disturbing” investigation into the roots of slavery and the rise of the abolitionist movement.

In the nearly four decades since, Davis — a professor emeritus of history at Yale and founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition there — has solidified his reputation as one of the world’s foremost historians of slavery with a series of landmark works, including Slavery and Human Progress, Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology, and Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery. He was recently awarded the Society of American Historians’ lifetime achievement award.

On Wednesday, Nov. 3, Davis will present the annual Jefferson Memorial Lecture, titled “Exodus, Black Colonization, and Promised Lands.” The lecture series, sponsored by the Graduate Council, has previously featured Jeane Kirkpatrick, Alan Simpson, Thomas Foley, Walter LaFeber, and Archibald Cox speaking on topics related to the American governmental system and the Jeffersonian tradition.

Davis will speak at 4:10 p.m. in the Lipman Room, Barrows Hall.