David Brion Davis, founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction for his bookThe Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. The NBCC Awards are ranked among the most prestigious of American literary prizes.

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation is the final book in a trilogy that was first conceived as far back as the 1950s. Building upon decades of research, Davis shows how the development of the anti-slavery movement represented one of human history’s greatest moral transformations. Examining events such as the Haitian Revolution, colonization attempts, and various Anglo-American abolition movements, Davis concludes that “moral progress seems to be historical, cultural and institutional, not the result of a genetic improvement in human nature.”

Professor Davis is a longtime AHA member and we commend him on his achievement.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.