Tag: Nancy Cott

David Brion Davis, 1927-2019: Countersubversive at Yale

David Brion Davis, the pathbreaking Yale historian of slavery and emancipation, whose books revolutionized how we approach the American experience, has died. The obituaries have rightly discussed his many and manifold contributions, a legacy we will be parsing in the days and months ahead. Yet for those of us who were graduate students at Yale during the 1990s and who participated in the union drive there, the story of David Brion Davis is more complicated. Davis helped break the grade strike of 1995, in a manner so personal and peculiar, yet simultaneously emblematic, as not to be forgotten. Not long after the strike, I wrote at length about Davis’s actions in an essay called “Blacklisted and Blue: On Theory and […]

Eli’s Comin’—Hide Your Heart, Girl: Why Yale is Going to Singapore

In Fall 1998, my penultimate semester at Yale, I TA’d for a course called “Yale and the External World.” Taught by historian Gaddis Smith, it was part of the university’s annual DeVane Lectures, in which a distinguished member of the faculty is given an opportunity to expound over the course of a semester—to students, alums, and the public—on a topic of his or her choice. Other DeVane Lecturers have included Nancy Cott on the history of marriage, whose lectures ultimately became this excellent book, Michael Denning on democracy, and more. But in 1998, Yale was heading toward its tercentennial, and President Richard Levin wanted someone to take stock of “the evolution of the University’s place in the modern world.” Smith, […]