David Brion Davis - Cultural Historian

Cultural Historian

In a seminal essay in the 1968 American Historical Review entitled “Some Recent Directions in American Cultural History,” Davis urged historians to devote more attention to the cultural dimension to enhance understanding of social controversies, political decision-making, and literary expression. At a time when social history was ascendant, and cultural history was associated with the study of the arts, taste, and popular culture, and intellectual history with the study of abstract ideas largely divorced from specific social contexts, he called for a history that focused on beliefs, values, fears, aspirations, and emotions.

His revised dissertation, Homicide in American Fiction (1957), which located literary treatments of murder against shifting legal, psychological, and religious notions of personal responsibility, the nature and origins of evil, and mental and emotional abnormality, anticipated later works in the new cultural history and the new historicism. By situating popular and canonical literature against a backdrop of developments in early psychiatry, jurisprudence, moral philosophy, and theology, Davis explored the intricate connections between intellectual developments—such as evolving conceptions of the unconscious; social phenomena—such as the shifting roles and status of women; and the “free floating” fantasies of literature, where authors worked out, on an imaginative level, the implications of such social and intellectual transformations.

In succeeding works of American cultural history, including The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (1970), The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (1971), Antebellum American Culture (1979), Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations (1990), and The Boisterous Sea of Liberty (1999), Davis underscored the significance of the cultural dimension in understanding United States politics and society.

In The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (1969) and The Fear of Conspiracy (1971), Davis explores the role played in American history by fears of conspiracy and subversion. He highlights the American tendency to search for subversive enemies and to construct terrifying dangers from fragmentary and highly circumstantial evidence. In Revolutions, he analyzes Americans’ highly ambivalent responses to foreign revolutions—-from ecstatic celebrations of foreign peoples’ embrace of American ideals of democratic self-government to apocalyptic fears of foreign subversion. In addition to asking how a nation forged in revolution became, in the twentieth century, “the world’s leading adversary of popular revolutions,” he looks at how foreign revolutions at times expanded and sometimes constricted conceptions about the possibilities for reform at home.

Antebellum American Culture (1979), his panoramic look at the cultural discourse surrounding ethnicity, gender, family, race, science, and wealth and power in the pre-Civil War United States, advanced the argument that American culture needs to be understood in terms of an ongoing “moral civil war.” Diverse groups of Americans debated “what was happening, who was doing what to whom, what to fear and what to fight for.” He suggests that a relatively small group of Northeastern writers, preachers, and reformers in the 19th century United States ultimately succeeded in defining a set of middle-class norms regarding education, taste, sex roles, sensibility, and moral respectability.