DAVIS

NEW YORK (AP) — David Brion Davis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who documented the centrality of slavery in Western culture through a landmark trilogy that made him among the world’s most respected and influential scholars, has died.

Davis, a professor emeritus at Yale University, died Sunday at age 92. Yale announced that he died of natural causes.

Starting in 1967 with “The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture,” Davis traced the evolution of how the West regarded human bondage from ancient times to the present. Davis drew upon the Bible, Greek philosophy and political and economic debates to show how the West defended, rationalized and fought for slavery before beginning to turn against it in the 18th and 19th centuries. He explored debates over whether the Bible justified or condemned slavery, how revolutionary leaders in the United States and France supported slavery even while fighting for their own freedom and how even some abolitionists advocated sending freed slaves to a foreign country.

“I became convinced that the problem of slavery transcended national boundaries in ways that I had not suspected,” he wrote. “In Western culture it was associated with certain religious and philosophical doctrines that gave it the highest sanction.”

His other books in the trilogy were “The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution,” published in 1976, and “The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation,” which came out in 2014. It was an epic study that took a half century to complete, ran for some 1,500 pages and brought Davis the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle prize and the Bancroft Prize. He was praised for the thoroughness of his research, the originality of his thinking and prose that elegantly synthesized a vast range of time and thought. Eric Foner, himself a Pulitzer Prizewinning author of books about slavery and racism, would credit Davis with enlightening future generations.

“Previous historians, especially in the United States, had tended to see slavery as an exception, a footnote in a teleological narrative of progress,” Foner wrote in The Nation in 2014. “But Davis demonstrated that slavery became the key institution in the European conquest and settlement of the New World.”

Davis’ admirers also included a current Yale professor, David W. Blight, whose biography of Frederick Douglass won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday. In statement through Yale, Blight called Davis a “deeply spiritual man who saw the historian’s craft as a search for the minds and souls of people in the past.”