| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 297 words from this article are provided below; about 729 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

David Brion Davis. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. 464. $30.00
Evaluating this book is a complicated, somewhat daunting, task: the historiography of slavery and abolition—the landscape into which this book now enters, and from which we read it—has been profoundly shaped during the past decades by the previous contributions of its author. It is therefore an eagerly awaited book, and also one that will probably be saddled with the burden—one probably not wished for by David Brion Davis—of being seen as "definitive" in some sense. Happily, it lives up to what readers expect from Davis: it is engagingly written and impressively broad in its scope and analysis. While full of strong and well-documented interpretations, it is also a pleasingly open and balanced work, one that reads as an insightful intervention into an ongoing conversation, crystallizing but also prodding that conversation, returning to old questions and posing new ones, and along the way challenging us with the complexities and variations in the story of slavery in the Americas.	1
The book originated in a course taught by Davis on the history of slavery in the New World, first as a summer seminar for high school teachers, and then as an undergraduate course at Yale, starting in the 1990s. The text itself, Davis explains, was reconstructed from the lectures for this course, and this is reflected in the work's organization and style. Each chapter in the work has a slightly different optic, but they each have the feel of a good lecture, combining broad contextualization with illustrative anecdotes and analyses of specific texts and debates, tied together with transitions that smoothen the journey across different levels of analysis.	. . .

There are about 729 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.