For more than twenty years David Brion Davis has been recognized as a leading authority on the moral and ideological responses to slavery in the Western world. From Homicide to Slavery, Davis's first book of collected essays, brings together selections reflecting his wide-ranging interests in colonial history, Afro-American history, the social sciences, and American literature. The essays are interconnected by Davis's central concern with violence, irrationality, and the definition of moral limits during a period when Americans believed they were breaking free from historical constraints and acquiring new powers of self-perfection. Topics range from a socially revealing murder trial in 1843 to debates over capital punishment, movements of counter-subverison, the iconography of race, the cowboy as an American hero, the portrayal of violence in American literature, the historiography of slavery, and the British and American antislavery movements.

In American Homicide, Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. Roth argues that the United States is distinctive in its level of violence among unrelated adults—friends, acquaintances, and strangers. America was extraordinarily homicidal in the mid-seventeenth century, but it became relatively non-homicidal by the mid-eighteenth century, even in the slave South; and by the early nineteenth century, rates in the North and the mountain South were extremely low. But the homicide rate rose substantially among unrelated adults in the slave South after the American Revolution; and it skyrocketed across the United States from the late 1840s through the mid-1870s, while rates in most other Western nations held steady or fell. That surge—and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate—correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy. Those four factors, Roth argues, best explain why homicide rates have gone up and down in the United States and in other Western nations over the past four centuries, and why the United States is today the most homicidal affluent nation.

This comparative study looks at the laws concerning the murder of slaves by their masters and at how these laws were implemented. Andrew T. Fede cites a wide range of cases--across time, place, and circumstance--to illuminate legal, judicial, and other complexities surrounding this regrettably common occurrence. These laws had evolved to limit in different ways the masters' rights to severely punish and even kill their slaves while protecting valuable enslaved people, understood as "property," from wanton destruction by hirers, overseers, and poor whites who did not own slaves. To explore the conflicts of masters' rights with state and colonial laws, Fede shows how slave homicide law evolved and was enforced not only in the United States but also in ancient Roman, Visigoth, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British jurisdictions. His comparative approach reveals how legal reforms regarding slave homicide in antebellum times, like past reforms dictated by emperors and kings, were the products of changing perceptions of the interests of the public; of the individual slave owners; and of the slave owners' families, heirs, and creditors. Although some slave murders came to be regarded as capital offenses, the laws con-sistently reinforced the second-class status of slaves. This influence, Fede concludes, flowed over into the application of law to free African Americans and would even make itself felt in the legal attitudes that underlay the Jim Crow era.

This collection of Davis' work includes essays on capital punishment, movements of counter-subversion, the iconography of race, the cowboy as an American hero, the historiography of slavery, and the British and American antislavery movements.

As a quintessentially southern campus, Louisiana State University has logically spawned some of the most important regional scholarly studies of the twentieth century. During the campus' golden age in the 1930s, such eminent scholars as Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Eric Voeglin made LSU one of the leading academic institutions in the country. It was during this period that a series called the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, named in honor of a noted scholar and researcher at LSU in the early 1900s, was created to add to the body of knowledge in the developing field of southern history.Now considered one of the most distinguished lecture series of its kind, the Fleming series has brought to the LSU campus scholars of note who have studied the South in its various aspects. Lecturers ranging from C. Vann Woodward and Lewis P. Simpson to Eric Foner and Drew Gilpin Faust have presented a wide panorama of views and methodological approaches. In this book Burl Noggle presents an informative history of the lectures from 1937 through 1990.As a member of the LSU history faculty for more than thirty years, Noggle has heard most of the Fleming lectures delivered and has participated in the selection of lecturers. He thus brings a rather special perspective to his subject -- that of an insider who has been intimately involved in the series itself -- as well as the broader understanding of a mature scholar who has devoted a substantial portion of his career to the analysis of American historiography.Noggle focuses on two aspects of the Fleming series. On one level, he discusses the history of the lectures themselves -- who lectured on what topic, why each lecturer was chose, what general historiographical trends prevailed at the time, and how each speaker's lectures were related to scholarly currents within the profession. On another level, Noggle discusses just what the lecturers said about southern history and how they contributed to, qualified, refuted, or revised existing conceptions about southern history. The Fleming Lectures, 1937--1990 is, therefore, both a history of the lecture series and an analysis of the history contained in the lectures.

Few images of early America were more striking, and jarring, than that of slaves in the capital city of the world’s most important free republic. Black slaves served and sustained the legislators, bureaucrats, jurists, cabinet officials, military leaders, and even the presidents who lived and worked there. While slaves quietly kept the nation’s capital running smoothly, lawmakers debated the place of slavery in the nation, the status of slavery in the territories newly acquired from Mexico, and even the legality of the slave trade in itself. In the Shadow of Freedom, with essays by some of the most distinguished historians in the nation, explores the twin issues of how slavery made life possible in the District and how lawmakers in the District regulated slavery in the nation.