David Brion Davis

David Brion Davis died on April 14, 2019. A National Humanities Medal recipient and distinguished professor, Davis is credited with reshaping and fundamentally changing the way society understands the relationship between the history of America and American slavery. A past president of the Organization of American Historians, Davis was the founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is best known for his three most-influential publications, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975), and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014). In his lifetime he won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, a Bancroft Prize, and a National Book Critics Award.