ABSTRACT
David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution was the sequel to his earlier work The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. The success of his first book had sparked greater academic interest in the history of both slavery and antislavery. When Davis was a doctoral student at Harvard University, slavery occupied a very marginal position in the curriculum. It was not even mentioned in major historical works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American history. But during his studies, Davis came across Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s book An American Dilemma, a text that had a significant impact on him. By the early 1970s—when Davis was researching and writing The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution—the American civil rights movement had sparked a debate over the continuing marginalization of African Americans in American society.
