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David Brion Davis is an American historian and authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He is the Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, and founder and Director Emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is a foremost intellectual and cultural historian. The author and editor of sixteen books, and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, Davis has played a principal role in explaining the latest historiography to a broad audience. His books emphasize religious and ideological links among material conditions, political interests, and new political values. Ideology, in his view, is not a deliberate distortion of reality or a façade for material interests; rather, it is the conceptual lens through which groups of people perceive the world around them.
Davis taught at Yale from 1970 to 2001, after serving on the Cornell University faculty for 14 years. He has held one-year appointments as the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford University, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and as the first French-American Foundation Chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
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